One of the campaign promises that struck a nerve with Trump’s audience was his promise to Drain the Swamp. Now, it was relatively obvious at the time that this was referring to the Deep State (career government employees loyal to the Constitution) and Democrats, but many latched on to it as a promise to clamp down on lobbying and the proverbial revolving door between special interests and government.
This has, to put it lightly, not happened. Trump basically just used the Koch network as a recruiting service when staffing up.
Case in point: Clint Woods, who you may remember as the guy who worked on behalf of polluters who then went to the EPA and likely got caught inflating pollution figures to make California look bad, and then briefly went to a position created by the insurance industry at Ohio State University, and has now gone to work at the Koch’s Americans for Prosperity.
Woods’ career cycle from pollution apologist to supposed regulator at EPA and eventually back to pollution apologist is just one way industry can influence the regulatory process.
Another great example comes courtesy of New York Times reporting on how freshly FOIA’d emails show that a longtime Department of Interior staffer, Indur Goklany, has been inserting climate denial into official reports. The edits, described by others as “Goks uncertainty language,” wasn’t much different from the sort of pseudo-sophisticated denial we see on the blogs, which doesn’t directly deny that climate change is happening, but instead over-emphasizes concerns about climate model accuracy, estimates of the rate of warming, and similar issues.
Unlike most of the swamp creatures Trump hired, Goklany was a career staffer at DoI, employed for decades under multiple administrations, though he was elevated from the backbench to a leadership position under Trump.
So why did the administration trust this particular member of the supposed Deep State? Because while employed by the federal government, he wrote books for the Cato Institute, spoke at Heartland Events, and was paid to write for Heartland, according to the Washington Post’s reporting on a different tranche of emails showing his undue influence back in 2018.
Now, government employees palling around with and taking money from organizations funded by the polluters the government should be regulating is pretty bad, but it’s not even the worst case of this in the Trump administration.
Bloomberg’s Stephen Lee reported last week that the woman Trump appointed to be deputy general counsel for the White House Council on Environmental Quality in June 2017 and promoted to the top counsel spot a year later, Viktoria Seale, is married to the chemical industry lobby’s director of federal affairs as of February 2018, John Seale.
And Mr. Seale’s employer, the American Chemistry Council, has reported lobbying the CEQ on the National Environmental Policy Act in the last quarter of 2019.
Now, to be (more than) fair, both organizations are insistent that while ACC lobbied CEQ on NEPA, Mr. Seale wasn’t actually the one doing the lobbying and he doesn’t lobby on NEPA. And CEQ insists that Ms. Seale was up front about the relationship when her husband took the job, has recused herself from chemical issues, and “physically leaves the room” before any discussions about chemical policy happen.
So yes, we are expected to believe that while ACC has lobbied CEQ on NEPA, the ACC’s chief lobbyist wasn’t involved. And we’re supposed to believe that CEQ’s head lawyer simply gets up and leaves the room any time business on chemical issues are conducted- presumably to go home, and not talk to her husband about it.
Given that they likely don’t live by 1950’s sitcom rules, this means that Trump’s key environmental lawyer and the chemical lobby’s key lobbyist are quite literally in bed together.
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