Environmental Protection Agency enforcement teams are overly harsh and require mounds of paperwork on businesses they investigate for environmental crimes, Republican senators alleged Wednesday.
GOP lawmakers claimed even businesses that self-report aren’t spared.
In a subcommittee hearing of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, GOP senators criticized Cynthia Giles, assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, for what they described as a heavy-handed approach to punishing small businesses and farmers.
Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., said Giles’ office doesn’t work collaboratively with businesses, including those who self-report violations.
“Rather than assisting companies, the EPA simply choose to impose aggressive and, at times, unreasonable penalties using questionable enforcement methods,” Rounds said.
Rounds also took issue with how enforcement officers at the EPA investigate potential environmental law violations.
During the course of an investigation, it’s not unusual for the EPA to issue a document request to a company under Section 114 of the Clean Air Act. Information from these requests often ends up forming much of the factual basis for criminal and civil cases when environmental laws are violated.
Rounds argued that these requests, often made before a company has been formally charged with any wrongdoing, could be unfairly taxing to businesses. Federal paperwork reduction statutes do not bind the law, so companies often turn over paperwork to the EPA that could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, he said.
Companies who are afraid of going through such a document request may change their practices to please the EPA, and Rounds said that’s unfair.
“Isn’t this a back-door way to get industry to change its practices?” he asked.
Giles defended the agency by saying it wasn’t doing anything outside of what the law allowed.
She said the agency tries to work with small businesses by preparing guides when a new rule with “significant economic impacts” is handed down and tries to spell out the specific actions that would lead to compliance.
She added that most enforcement actions against businesses are worked out through negotiations that work for both parties.
“Encouraging responsible parties to enter into cooperative cleanup settlements has reduced the need for litigation, cleaned up thousands of communities and saved the American taxpayer billions of dollars in cleanup expenses,” she said.
Other Republican senators expressed concern that EPA enforcement officers might have a mandate from the Obama administration to crack down on greenhouse gas violations in order to comply with the Paris Agreement on climate change.
Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., said he’s concerned about an attitude within the agency that they’re out to “crucify” oil and gas companies. He asked Giles if she had a directive from the White House to crack down on those companies in order to meet climate goals, which she denied.
Still, Inhofe said that in order to meet the cuts spelled out in the Paris Agreement, EPA enforcement could end up specifically targeting those companies.
“We have made an effort through every group we can find, including the EPA, to determine how (Obama) is going to do that, and we haven’t been able to find anyone who believes it can be done,” he said.
Alaska Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan added that he was concerned about EPA officers who carried guns.
Sullivan said he was in favor of “an armed citizenry, not an armed bureaucracy,” and criticized Giles for how officers appeared while conducting a 2013 raid in Alaska on a placer mining operation. Sullivan said the EPA officers looked more like the Army than environmental officers, and an investigation by the state of Alaska said there was little to no coordination with state law enforcement officials.
Sullivan said he hoped Giles and her office have learned from not coordinating with state authorities.
“The governor’s report in Alaska said there could have been a terrible tragedy, a terrible accident,” he said.
