Former EPA Chiefs Back ‘Reset’ Of The Agency After The Coming Presidential Election

Coming together on Wednesday to back a comprehensive set of recommendations of the troubled agency, six former chiefs for the Environmental Protection Agency encouraged a “reset” following the upcoming presidential election.

The recommendations — hundreds in all — were drafted by a bipartisan group of over 500 formers EPA staffers, calling themselves the Environmental Protection Network (EPN), and mostly aim to undo the perceived damages of the Trump-era.

Nearly all the former EPA chiefs — William Reilly, Lee Thomas, Carol Browner, Christine Todd Whitman, Lisa Jackson and Gina McCarthy — signed off on the proposal. The only former EPA chief to abstain was Scott Pruitt, a climate change denier and the first EPA chief to serve under President Trump.

The proposal, “Resetting the Course of EPA," was created to potentially guide whatever administration assumes power following the Nov. 3 general election. While it does not specifically reference the potential Biden-Harris administration, many of its recommendations are actively critical of the EPA's industry-friendly and regulation-cutting policies. Some recommendations in the proposal include cutting political and business influencing from agency decision-making and more actively pursuing electric vehicles.

“Resetting the Course of EPA outlines specific and actionable steps that EPA leadership can take to reset the course of the agency to address the most significant and pervasive threats to public health and our environment,” the EPN web page reads.

Andrew Wheeler, former coal lobbyist and the current head of the EPA, strongly dismissed the group’s recommendations. A spokesperson for Wheeler accused the former EPA chiefs of having “botched” certain matters in the past, including the Flint water crisis and the air quality at Ground Zero post-9/11.

Wheeler’s EPA has consistently rolled back earlier environmental regulations that could be seen as complicating the operations of oil, coal and gas companies. Despite the agency’s claims that these rollbacks have not posed any harm to U.S. citizens, they have routinely been criticized by Democrats, environmental activists, and scientists for endangering the environment and the public health.