The president has turned federal agencies over to the very CEOs, lobbyists, and lawyers whom they are supposed to regulate.
By Lachlan Markay and Sam Stein
In August 2016, energy consultant Steven Gardner gave a presentation to the trade group Professional Engineers in Mining (PDF).
In it, he hammered the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of
Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement for what he said was a highly
flawed regulatory process behind the office’s Stream Protection Rule, a
regulation designed to prevent water pollution near coal production
sites. Gardner’s firm, ECSI LLC, had been retained by a coal industry trade group “to conduct a comprehensive critical review of the proposed rule,” which it opposed.
Gardner
ended his August 2016 presentation with a slide asking, “What’s next?”
that featured a photo of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary
Clinton. Contrary to the slide’s projection, Donald Trump prevailed and
ended up signing legislation rolling back the Stream Protection Rule.
And last week, things came full circle when the president
nominated Gardner to lead the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and
Enforcement, the very office he had vehemently criticized on behalf of a
client in the coal industry.
Environmentalists were,
naturally, outraged. The Sierra Club called the idea of Gardner running a
government agency that oversees mining operations “akin to hiring a
wolf to guard sheep.”
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Source: The Daily Beast
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