Files reveal EPA’s talks on pesticide

WASHINGTON — In the weeks before the Environmental Protection Agency decided to reject its own scientists’ advice to ban a potentially harmful pesticide, Scott Pruitt, the agency’s head, promised farming industry executives who wanted to keep using the pesticide that it is “a new day, and a new future,” and that he was listening to their pleas.

Details on this meeting and dozens of other meetings in the weeks leading up to the late March decision by Pruitt are contained in more than 700 pages of internal agency documents obtained by The New York Times through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Though hundreds of pages describing the deliberations were redacted from the documents, the internal memos show how the EPA’s new staff, appointed by President Donald Trump, pushed the agency’s career staff to draft a ruling that would deny the decade-old petition by environmentalists to ban the pesticide, chlorpyrifos.

Chlorpyrifos is still widely used in agriculture — on apples, oranges, strawberries, almonds and many other fruits — though it was barred from residential use in 2000. The EPA’s scientists have recommended it be banned from use on farms and produce because it has been linked to lower IQs and developmental delays among agricultural workers and their children.

At a March 1 meeting at EPA headquarters with members of the American Farm Bureau Federation from Washington state, industry representatives pressed the EPA not to reduce the number of pesticides available. They said there were not enough alternative pesticides to chlorpyrifos. They also said there was a need for “a reasonable approach to regulate this pesticide,” which is widely used in Washington state, and that they wanted “the farming community to be more involved in the process.”

According to the documents, Pruitt “stressed that this is a new day, a new future, for a common-sense approach to environmental protection.” He said the new administration “is looking forward to working closely with the agricultural community.”

Three days before Trump’s inauguration, Dow Chemical had separately submitted a request to the agency to reject the petition to ban chlorpyrifos, calling the scientific link between the childhood health issues and the pesticide unclear, agency records show.

Amy Graham, an EPA spokesman, said the denial of the petition to ban chlorpyrifos was justified.

“Taking emails out of context doesn’t change the fact that we continue to examine the science surrounding chlorpyrifos,” she said in a written statement. She added that the agency was examining “scientific concerns with the methodology used by the previous administration.”

Environmental groups said the emails demonstrate that the EPA under Pruitt is doing favors for the industry, even if it means compromising public health.