It’s been no big secret that when presidential candidate Trump promised to drain the swamp, he meant he was going to purge the experts and replace them with industry employees who would — instead of protecting the public from polluters — protect their (former) employers’ profits. This “revolving door,” as it’s known in DC, between government and industry and back again has always been a problem. But it’s generally one that administrations try to prevent or reign in (or at the very least try to make it look like they're trying), and usually government employees wait to leave their official positions in government before cashing out to go lobby for the industry.
But, as a new investigation from E&E shows, it’s not just the top brass who worked for coal companies either before coming to the EPA (Wheeler) or after leaving (Pruitt) but, even among underlings, there is “a pattern among Trump administration appointees in EPA's air office in catering to previous or future employers.”
For example, Kelley Raymond is currently a senior advisor in the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, but prior to becoming a regulator, she was a lobbyist for polluters, like those at the National Association of Manufacturers, which led multiple campaigns to weaken regulations that the EPA is now working on. (Specifically, subjecting potential regulations that are otherwise intended to protect human health to limited cost-benefit analyses, so they’d only protect people if it's profitable to do so.)
Sure, there are ethical rules about not engaging with things you’ve previously lobbied on, but technically Raymond was hired as an “administratively determined” employee, so the ethical standards are lower, with a “cooling off period” of just two years before she could work on projects she lobbied on. So because Raymond went to lobby for a different industry (air conditioning) after NAM and before joining the EPA, there’s “nothing in federal ethics law” that “precludes her from working on the proposal.”
The EPA wouldn’t release what edits she’d made to it, but email traffic makes it clear Raymond was very excited to see NAM’s wishes come true: “I believe this is shaping up really well!” and “Excellent!!!!”
Meanwhile, others are looking at what life might be like after their stint in the Trump administration, as acting head of the Office of Air and Radiation Anne Austin is apparently auditioning for a job in Bracewell LLP, the major lobbying firm that has led many lawsuits against the EPA on behalf of polluters.
Though apparently still just interviewing, Austin has formally recused herself from the EPA’s dealings with Bracewell, but if that’s where she ends up, she won’t be the first. Going from the EPA to polluters’ lobby is apparently the move to make these days, as former EPA lawyer Matt Leopold recently jumped ship to another industry defender, Hunton Andrews Kurth.
Sadly enough, this isn’t even the start of the overlap between regulators and polluters. The EPA air office chief Bill Wehrum was a lobbyist for Hunton Andrews Kurth before his EPA stint, and another former partner, David Harlow, is still a Senior Counsel for the air office. Both Wehrum and Harlow came under pressure from Congress for failing to recuse themselves from a dispute between the EPA and one of the firm’s former clients.
So while it’s certainly a nice gesture to require ethics pledges and recusals, the fact is that these people were obviously hired because of their connection to industry, not despite of it.
The Sierra Club’s John Coequyt told E&E that “with this administration, it seems to be the central driving factor in their decision making process; they bring in people who worked on behalf of industry to undermine these rules.”
Because who knows how to dismantle regulations on pollution better than polluters?
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