By Don Hopey

July 17, 2018 - Andrew Wheeler, the acting Environmental Protection Agency administrator, seems intent on setting a new tone for the embattled agency but not a new direction for the industry-friendly Trump administration.

Wheeler, 53, who took the helm of the agency July 9 after Scott Pruitt resigned amid several ethics investigations, said he will continue the deregulatory course set by his predecessor, although without the rancor.

“I would love to depoliticize environmental issues. I think we can find common ground with Democrats,” he said, citing past bipartisan support for a diesel engine emission regulation, industrial site reclamation and the clean up of abandoned mine sites. “There are definitely things we can do to clean up the environment in a bipartisan fashion and I want to reach out and work with those people who want to work with us.”

But Wheeler said he has also told his assistant administrators at the agency that nothing has changed in terms of the administration’s deregulatory agenda.

“When (the president) called me to be the acting administrator, he said keep cleaning up the air and cleaning up the water and keep deregulating. He said we can do all three, and I agree with him,” said the low-key Wheeler, who spoke with members of the Post-Gazette editorial board Monday after touring a shale gas well site in Washington County.

Wheeler, who spent four years working for the EPA under presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in the early 1990s and more recently was a registered coal industry lobbyist, said his goal is to make the EPA’s permitting and enforcement programs more efficient and certain.

He said management changes at an EPA enforcement office in Colorado have reduced the average time to produce an inspection report from 280 to 60 days. He said the agency’s goal is to reduce the time for enforcement decisions, which can sometimes take several years, to one year.

“I don’t think that’s fair to American businesses,” he said. “Again, as I said to employees, I’m not saying let people off the hook. I’m not saying we reduce fines. But we reach a decision faster.”

Wheeler, a native of Hamilton, Ohio, near Cincinnati, said he also wants the agency to do a better job of informing Americans about the environmental risks from day-to-day exposures and from big impact events, such as the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center towers in New York City in 2001, the chemical contamination of the Elk and Kanawha rivers caused by a leaking storage tank near Charleston, W. Va., in 2014, and the toxic levels of lead in the Flint, Mich., water supply, also in 2014.

“If you live near an oil refinery, near a steel or chemical plant, we need to be able to tell people who surround those areas what is the risk that they face, what are the risks their families and their children face, and we don’t do a very (good job). We’re not coherent in the risk communication,” he said. “And if the risk assessment changes, we need to go back and explain what is new risk they face.”

While Wheeler, unlike Mr. Pruitt, said he believes “climate change is real and that people have an impact on the climate,” he also criticized the Obama administration for trying to control greenhouse gas emissions through the Clean Power Plan, which was stayed by the U.S. Supreme Court.

“The Clean Power Plan went outside the four corners of the Clean Air Act. I will only, can only, implement law that Congress gives us,” he said. “We now have a replacement for the Clean Power Plan at OMB (Office of Management and Budget) for review. I’m sure there are conservatives who will criticize us. They didn’t want us to do anything. We’ll also be criticized from the environmental side because we aren’t doing enough. But I’m doing what the law tells us we can do.” 

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