EPA's Wheeler To Congress: Please Cut My Budget, But We'll Do A Great Job, And We Really Care
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Wheeler pointed to Trump’s Paris withdrawal and said the agency was working within its legal authority to tackle climate change. Critics of the Obama administration argued that it had overstepped its bounds, particularly with its regulation to curb emissions from power plants, known as the Clean Power Plan. The Trump team scrapped that rule. “Excluding climate from the budget, eliminating research and voluntary industry partnership programs and weakening modest existing rules — which has happened — does not give me any indication that the agency is taking this environmental threat seriously,” Tonko said.
Prior to being hired for the Trump EPA, Wheeler was a coal industry lobbyist. He previously worked for Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Inhofe, who was long known as the Senate’s most vocal skeptic of climate change. Wheeler was also previously a career staffer at EPA during the 1990s, when he worked in the agency’s toxics office.
Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester, a Democrat from Delaware, grilled Wheeler Thursday on his plans to cut funding for the agency’s Toxics Release Inventory, which shows the public when industries are emitting toxic chemicals into the environment.
Blunt Rochester called the database an essential tool for communities to find out about the releases of harmful chemicals. “Because of this, I’m concerned that you have proposed cutting the budget for TRI by a third,” she told Wheeler. Wheeler said he fully supports the program and believes it would continue even under the proposed cuts. Blunt Rochester was skeptical. “So you fully support it, but cut it by a third?” she said.
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https://www.virginiamercury.com/2020/03/02/trump-epa-chief-to-congress-cut-my-funding/
