E.P.A. Promised ‘a New Day’ for the Agriculture Industry, Documents Reveal
They also said there was a need for “a reasonable approach to regulate this pesticide,” which is widely used in Washington State, and
that they wanted “the farming community to be more involved in the process.”
According to the documents, Mr. Pruitt “stressed that this is a new day, a new future, for a common-sense approach to environmental
protection.” He said the new administration “is looking forward to working closely with the agricultural community.”
Three days before Donald J. Trump’s inauguration, Dow Chemical had separately submitted a request to the agency to reject the petition
to ban chlorpyrifos, calling the scientific link between the childhood health issues and the pesticide unclear, agency records show.
WASHINGTON — In the weeks before the Environmental Protection Agency decided to reject its own scientists’ advice to ban a potentially harmful pesticide, Scott Pruitt, the agency’s head, promised farming industry executives who wanted to keep using the pesticide
that it is “a new day, and a new future,” and that he was listening to their pleas.
She added that the agency was examining “scientific concerns with the methodology used by the previous administration.”
The emails show that as late as March 7, Wendy Cleland-Hamnett, the acting head of the E. P.A.’s office of chemical safety, was presenting
the top political staff with options for how to handle the decade-old petition from an environmental group requesting the ban.
The next day, Ryan Jackson, Mr. Pruitt’s chief of staff, wrote to another political appointee
that he had “scared” the agency’s career staff, suggesting that he had made clear the direction that the political staff wanted to go — and given the career staff explicit verbal orders to prepare documents explaining why the agency had shifted its position.
