Ex-EPA chiefs: Reset the agency
Six former agency heads want a reset after Trump’s regulation-chopping, industry-minded first term.
Six former Environmental Protection Agency chiefs are calling for an agency reset after President Donald Trump’s regulation-chopping, industryminded first term, backing a detailed plan by former EPA staffers that ranges from renouncing political influence in regulation to boosting climate-friendly electric vehicles.
Most living former EPA heads joined in Wednes- day’s appeal, with Trump’s first EPA chief, Scott Pruitt, being the notable exception. The group — William Reilly, Lee Thomas, Carol Browner, Christine Todd Whitman, Lisa Jackson and Gina McCarthy — served under Republican and Democratic presidents.
The Environmental Protection Network, a bipartisan group of more than 500 former EPA senior managers and employees, crafted hundreds of pages of recommendations for a change of course at the agency.
The group said the road map was meant to guide whatever administration the Nov. 3 presidential election puts in place, although many proposals are implicitly or explicitly critical of Trump’s EPA actions. The former EPA heads’ accompanying statement did not mention Trump but said they were “concerned about the current state of affairs at EPA.”
Spokesman James Hewitt on Wednesday said EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler “won’t be taking ‘reset’ advice from administrators who ignored the Flint lead crisis, botched the Gold King Mine response, and encouraged New Yorkers to breathe contaminated air at Ground Zero,” Hewitt said in an email, referencing drinking water contamination in Flint, Michigan, and a waste water spill in Colorado.
Some of the reset recommendations were aimed at the Trump era, such as minimizing industry and political influence on science-based decisions in regulatory actions, combating climate change and cutting air pollution with electric vehicles, and others.
The proposals are in line with critics’ complaints about Trump and with many of Democratic presidential rival Joe Biden’s proposals.
The EPA under Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist, has been an avid agent of Trump’s drive to cut regulations he sees as unnecessarily burdensome to business, including the coal, gas and oil industries. The administration says it is rolling back rules without increasing risk to the public health and environment.
Nationally, many public health officials, environmental groups, Democratic lawmakers, scientists and others disagree, saying Trump’s regulation-cutting, combined with sharp drops in many areas of enforcement against polluters, is increasing air and water pollutants and industrial toxins and jeopardizing the health of Americans.
When it comes to the EPA’s mandate of protecting peoples’ health and the environment, “the last few years, the agency has been derailed from that mission,” Browner, who led the agency in the Clinton administration, said in a statement.
The ex-EPA staffers’ recommendations range from broad mandates — like increasing the agency’s actions across the board on the disproportionate exposure that Black, Hispanic and other minority communities and low-income areas have to all kinds of dangerous pollutants — to the specific, like which measures from Trump’s first term to focus on in the first 100 days of a new term. They also urge increased funding.
Other Trump EPA measures on the “out” list in the reset proposal include a “transparency” rule supported by industry that limits what public health studies the agency can use in making regulations; a Trump-driven move to ease vehicle mileage and emission standards; and a heavily voluntary plan for cutting fossil fuel emissions by power plants that replaced the Obama administration’s broad plan for making the nation’s power sector more climate friendly.
Another recommendation: Cultivate “a more open and respectful exchange between reporters and EPA.”