Ex-EPA official facing inquiry
WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency’s inspector general will investigate allegations that William Wehrum, the agency’s former air quality chief, violated ethics rules when he met with former clients from his days as a lawyer and lobbyist for the oil, gas and coal industries.
The inquiry will look into whether Wehrum’s efforts at the EPA to weaken climate change and air pollution standards improperly benefited those former clients, a congressional aide said.
Wehrum resigned last month after helping put in place a regulation that would relax rules the Obama administration had sought to impose on greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants. As the agency’s assistant administrator for air and radiation, he was the legal expert behind other rollbacks of climate change and air pollution regulations, including the weakening of Obamaera rules on greenhouse gas emissions from automobile tailpipes and methane from oil and gas wells.
At issue in the inquiry are Wehrum’s ties to the Utility Air Regulatory Group, a coalition of utilities and trade groups that lobbies on behalf of coal-fired power plants and which he represented as a lawyer at his former firm, Hunton & Williams.
That relationship first drew scrutiny last year after Politico reported that the 25 power companies and six trade groups that make up the coalition paid the firm more than $8 million in 2017, just before President Donald Trump appointed Wehrum. (The firm is now known as Hunton Andrews Kurth. The Utility Air Regulatory Group announced in May that it would disband after winding down operations.)
The House Energy and Commerce Committee has already opened an inquiry into whether Wehrum and David Harlow, a senior counsel at the EPA who worked with Wehrum at the law firm, improperly worked to reverse an enforcement action that would have aided a former client, DTE Energy.
Sens. Tom Carper of Delaware, the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, and Sheldon Whitehouse, DR.I., sent an investigative report Sunday to the EPA inspector general that outlined new allegations about Wehrum and Harlow. Those included accusations that Wehrum’s recusal statements did not disclose some meetings with former clients.
In a letter to Charles Sheehan, the EPA inspector general, the senators accused the Trump administration of ethical failings and an absence of accountability. They said those shortcomings “should not be aided by an implicit message that one can avoid investigation if one simply resigns before the investigation is complete.”
Wehrum could not immediately be reached for comment. Michael Abboud, an EPA spokesman, issued a statement disputing the facts of the Senate Democrats’ report and described it as “a replay of old allegations that have repeatedly been answered by the agency and Wehrum.”
The new investigation was first reported by the Washington Post.
Under ethics rules developed under the Obama and Trump administrations, officials are not permitted to take part in “particular matters” involving specific parties on which they worked in the private sector. They are, however, allowed to offer general expertise.