Category: U.S. EPA

Scott Pruitt’s Crimes Against Nature

Read the full story in Rolling Stone.

While the rest of the Trump administration has been mired in scandal or incompetence (or both), and the media has been distracted by the Republican health care debacle and daily revelations about the Trump family’s involvement with the Russians, Pruitt has been quietly tearing down decades of environmental progress. “If there was ever an example of the fox guarding the henhouse, this is it,” says Michael Mann, a noted climate scientist at Penn State University. “We have a Koch-brothers-connected industry shill who is now in charge of climate and environmental policy for the entire country.”

Top EPA official resigns over direction of agency under Trump

Read the full story at The Hill.

A top Environmental Protection Agency official resigned Tuesday in protest of the direction the EPA has taken under President Trump.

Elizabeth “Betsy” Southerland ended her 30-year run at the agency with a scathing exit letter in which she claimed that “the environmental field is suffering from the temporary triumph of myth over truth.” She last worked as the director of science and technology in the Office of Water.

At EPA museum, history might be in for a change

Read the full story in the Washington Post.

Scott Pruitt has repeated a particular line again and again since becoming the head of the Environmental Protection Agency.

“The future ain’t what it used to be at the EPA,” he’s fond of saying.

As it turns out, the past may not be what it once was, either.

In an obscure corner of the Ronald Reagan International Trade Building, a debate is underway about how to tell the story of the EPA’s history and mission.

GOP Effort To Make Environmental Science ‘Transparent’ Worries Scientists

Read the full story at NPR.

Groups that represent industries from farming to fracking are supporting a legislative push to rewrite how government handles science when drawing up regulations.

And the whole effort has scientists worried.

On Capitol Hill, EPA chief gets an earful about Trump’s ‘downright offensive’ budget plan

Read the full story in the Washington Post.

Another trip to Capitol Hill for Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, another reminder that lawmakers from both parties have no intention of approving the deep cuts President Trump is seeking at the agency.

EPA staffers, Trump official clashed over new chemical rules

Read the full story in Politico.

The Trump administration released the nation’s most important chemical-safety rules in decades Thursday — but only after making a series of business-friendly changes overseen by a former industry advocate who holds a top post at the EPA.

Career agency employees had raised objections to the changes steered by EPA Deputy Assistant Administrator Nancy Beck, who until April was the senior director of regulatory science policy at the American Chemistry Council, the chemical industry’s leading lobbying group. Those include limits on how broadly the agency would review thousands of potentially hazardous substances, EPA staffers wrote in an internal memo reviewed by POLITICO.

Watchdog faults EPA’s chemical safety tools

Read the full story in The Hill.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) internal watchdog wants it to better manage the ways it uses technology to help test the safety of chemicals.

The EPA’s inspector general said two offices in the agency — the research and development office and the chemical safety office — have successfully collaborated to build and use tools for risk analysis, finding safety data and other functions in the chemical testing process.

But the chemical safety office lacks a strong process for ensuring that the cooperation goes smoothly and can last and could benefit from better “management controls,” the inspector general wrote in a Friday report.