EPA fights agency watchdog accusations chief of staff stonewalled investigations

The inquiries at issue include an audit requested in 2017 by several Democratic lawmakers, led by House Science Committee Chairwoman Eddie Bernice Johnson of Texas, asking the inspector general to examine whether Jackson attempted to interfere with the congressional testimony of an EPA science adviser. That testimony, from Deborah Swackhamer, the former chairwoman of EPA’s Board of Scientific Counselors, raised concerns about how the EPA was restricting the membership of its science advisory panels.

The EPA Office of Inspector General sent a so-called seven-day letter to EPA officials last week, saying Jackson refused to cooperate and provide information for an audit and an administrative investigation. That seven-day letter required Wheeler to notify Congress of the inspector general’s concerns.

“If information is choked off, we cannot fulfill our congressional charter and produce work of the rigor and quality expected by the American public,” wrote acting Inspector General Charles Sheehan, a career official. “To countenance open defiance even in one instance — much less two, both by a senior official setting precedent for himself and all agency staff — is ruinous.”

The Office of Inspector General did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

However, the documents the EPA provided committees that oversee the agency lay out an escalating back-and-forth between Office of Inspector General staffers and Jackson over current investigations.

Jackson, in a chain of emails from last month that the EPA made public, accused staffers from the watchdog office of harassing his assistant in an attempt to demand a meeting with him. Jackson also accused the staffers of trying to trap him in a “bait and switch” in a meeting a day after that incident “intended to try to get me to provide them with incorrect or inconsistent information.”

EPA general counsel Matthew Leopold, in a separate legal opinion, said Wheeler on Tuesday called Sheehan to attempt to arrange a sit-down interview with the office’s staff and Jackson. EPA officials had asked Sheehan to withdraw the seven-day letter requiring Congress be notified but he refused, Leopold said.

That refusal “is troubling and undermines the cooperative and iterative relationship that EPA has shared with its OIG,” Wheeler wrote to lawmakers.

The back-and-forth the EPA documents detail suggests the relationship between Trump EPA officials and the EPA’s watchdog office hasn’t smoothed out since the exit of former EPA head Scott Pruitt, whose tumultuous tenure prompted a handful of inspector general investigations, some of which are still ongoing.

Leopold, for example, in his legal opinion said Jackson and other EPA officials shouldn’t have to reveal how Jackson obtained Swackhamer’s testimony before the 2017 congressional hearing.

“[T]his piece of information does not appear to be even necessary to conduct an ‘audit’ to improve EPA operations,” Leopold wrote. “EPA is keenly aware of inter-branch concerns and should follow normal channels, i.e. the Congressional oversight process, to appropriately accommodate specific legislative prerogatives.”

And the increasing tensions come as President Trump’s nominee for the EPA’s inspector general, Sean O’Donnell, is making his way through the confirmation process.

O’Donnell, a career government official, already appears to have bipartisan support, and he didn’t face much opposition during his Oct. 30 confirmation hearing before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

But O’Donnell, during his confirmation hearing, did promise to “doggedly” investigate any abuses or ethics controversies by EPA officials, even after they have left the agency. Democratic lawmakers have urged the EPA inspector general’s office to continue probing a number of issues related to Pruitt’s tenure, as well as the tenure of former EPA air policy chief Bill Wehrum.