The Senate on Wednesday confirmed Aaron Szabo to head EPA’s air office, handing one of the agency’s most powerful posts to a former lobbyist with past ties to the oil business and other regulated industries.
The 49-47 vote fell along party lines. Szabo, an attorney, has been at EPA since the start of Trump’s second term in late January as a senior adviser to the administrator. The tally was unusually close because several GOP lawmakers, including Sens. Katie Britt of Alabama and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, did not vote.
Szabo’s elevation to head the Office of Air and Radiation formally positions him to play a lead role in a host of Clean Air Act rollbacks already planned by Administrator Lee Zeldin.
The White House regulations office, for example, is reviewing an EPA proposal to revisit the landmark 2009 endangerment finding that undergirds the agency’s work to regulate greenhouse gases.
