EPA can’t find written evidence of a task force designed to overhaul the agency’s New Source Review permitting program that former Administrator Scott Pruitt described to a congressional panel in late 2017.
“There is a task force internal to the agency to address NSR steps going forward in 2018. It is a very important area as you have indicated,” Pruitt told Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) during a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Environment.
EPA now says, however, there is no record of the task force’s membership or purview.
“A search of the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation and the Office of the Administrator for records responsive to your request produced no responsive records,” Elizabeth White, director of EPA’s Office of the Executive Secretariat, wrote this week in reply to an E&E News’ Freedom of Information Act request filed shortly after Pruitt’s testimony.
Pruitt resigned under pressure last July; he did not reply to an email yesterday sent to an intermediary asking whether the task force was ever created. EPA press aides also did not respond to questions about the task force’s existence and the lack of documentation.
But the episode falls into a pattern of Pruitt initiatives that left behind little or no discernible paper trails.
“It’s very much in keeping with the presidential strategy of making grand, sweeping announcements before there’s an actual plan to go forward with them,” said Kevin Bell, staff counsel for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), an advocacy group that has repeatedly clashed with the Trump administration over records issues.
In May 2017, for example, Pruitt said he had “sent out a directive” across EPA to curb the practice that critics dubbed “sue and settle.” In response to another E&E News records request, however, EPA officials later conceded the directive had been “oral,” unaccompanied by a formal written document (Greenwire, July 3, 2017).
The next month, Pruitt announced he had created an “Ozone Cooperative Compliance Task Force” to help states with implementation of the 2015 ozone standards. But thousands of pages of records since released to E&E News show no direct evidence of the task force’s existence or activities. Asked in late 2017 about the group’s membership, Brittany Bolen, a top policy official at the agency, declined to comment on the grounds that it was an “internal task force” (Greenwire, Dec. 20, 2017).
And when PEER sued the same year to obtain internal records of the Superfund Task Force created by Pruitt to recommend improvements to the toxic site cleanup program, a Justice Department official acknowledged in an email that the group kept no minutes of its meetings and there were no selection criteria for members, all of whom were EPA volunteers.
In a report last month, EPA’s inspector general concluded the agency complied with applicable record-keeping requirements in documenting the Superfund Task Force’s decisions but could have been more open about the process and the qualifications of task force members (E&E News PM, June 24).
In his December 2017 appearance before the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Environment, Pruitt would have had reason to highlight his eagerness to explore changes to New Source Review requirements. The Clean Air Act program requires industries to get pre-construction permits before undertaking plant upgrades or expansions that could lead to significant increase in air pollution.
Environmental groups see the program as a bulwark for maintaining air quality. Business groups and Republican lawmakers, however, describe New Source Review as a cumbersome regulatory impediment. The program is of particular interest to Griffith, who has introduced legislation to ease the threshold for triggering NSR permitting requirements.
But while EPA has since pressed ahead with a series of administrative changes to the program, most were known priorities of air chief Bill Wehrum, who recently resigned. A Griffith spokesman had no further insight.
“While our office has worked with the EPA on New Source Review reform, we are not familiar with any activities of this task force,” Kevin Baird said yesterday in an email.
