Internal emails show top EPA official lobbied to loosen air pollution rules before joining agency

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Internal emails show top EPA official lobbied to loosen air pollution rules before joining agency
Drain the swamp right into the EPA.
Natasha Geiling
May 10, 2018, 3:12 pm


On May 22, 2017, six months before he would be confirmed to a top regulatory position within the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Bill Wehrum — then working as an energy industry attorney for a prominent D.C. firm — wrote to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s scheduler, Sydney Hupp, with a request.

“I am writing on behalf of the Brick Industry Association (BIA) to request a meeting with Administrator Pruitt,” Wehrum wrote, explaining that he was hoping to get a meeting to discuss new emissions standards for hazardous pollutants associated with brick manufacturing.

On June 15, Wehrum continued, a few members of the BIA would be visiting Washington and hoped to discuss “the enormous impact that the rule is having on the industry and some of BIA’s ideas as to how the rule could be improved and the burden lessened.”

Pruitt was unavailable to meet with the BIA members that day, but according to emails recently made public by the Sierra Club through a Freedom of Information Act request, Wehrum did secure a thirty-minute meeting with Samantha Dravis, a top political aide to the administrator.

Six months later, Wehrum now oversees the office in charge of the very regulations that were the subject of his client meeting with Dravis.

While the EPA has not taken any official action regarding the emissions standards for brick production, the incident highlights the extremely close relationship between former lobbyists and regulators under Administrator Pruitt, even as President Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed to “drain the swamp” and remove lobbyist influence from Washington.

“This is very disturbing – yet another example of the Trump Administration hiring industry lobbyists to run EPA and weaken pollution control regulations from inside the agency, regardless of the harm to human health,” Tom Pelton, spokesman for the Environmental Integrity Project, told ThinkProgress via email. “It’s supposed to be the EPA — not the IPA, Industry Protection Agency.”

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https://thinkprogress.org/top-epa-official-wehrum-secretly-lobbied-the-agency-before-his-confirmation-68daa428de24/