Ex-EPA heads under Reagan, Bushes, decry Trump rollbacks

WASHINGTON— Environmental Protection Agency heads under three previous Republican presidents joined their Democratic counterparts Tuesday in telling lawmakers they were concerned by the Trump administration’s rapid rollbacks of environmental protections.

“The EPA on the track it’s on is endangering public health,” Christine Todd Whitman, EPA administrator under President George W. Bush, told the House Energy and Commerce oversight subcommittee. Whitman said she was “deeply concerned that five decades of environmental progress are at risk because of the attitudes and approach of this administration.”

Lee Thomas and William K. Reilly, EPA chiefs under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, respectively, also spoke, as did Obamaera EPA leader Gina McCarthy. The unusual testimony came after seven of the 10 surviving, Senateconfirmed past heads of the 49-year-old EPA signed a letter urging lawmakers to work to make the EPA focus on its mission of protecting public health and the environment.

Much of the criticisms from the former EPA heads focused on perceptions that the Trump administration was focusing on economic interests, sidelining or rejecting science and minimizing environmental and health effects in moving to ease dozens of environmental regulations.

Republicans on the subcommittee did not join the expressions of alarm at the rollbacks, saying instead said the EPA under past presidents had grown uncommunicative or adversarial with businesses and ordinary people.