Sen. Joni Ernst is blocking one of President Trump’s top environmental nominees to force answers from the Environmental Protection Agency on federal biofuels requirements.
Ernst, an Iowa Republican, said Friday she will oppose the nomination of Doug Benevento, tapped to be the EPA’s deputy administrator, until the agency says how it will address dozens of “gap” waivers from small oil refiners seeking exemptions from the Renewable Fuel Standard. Without Ernst’s support, Benevento’s nomination will remain stuck in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, as many, if not all, Democrats are expected to oppose him.
“Iowa’s hardworking ethanol and biodiesel producers are sick of being yanked around by Andrew Wheeler and the EPA,” Ernst said in a statement. “Our producers need certainty; until we get that, no EPA nominee is getting my vote.”
In response to Ernst’s announcement, Senate Environment Committee Chairman John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican, said the committee won’t take up Benevento’s nomination because a path forward “no longer exists.”
“He is well qualified for the position but does not have the votes,” Barrasso told the Washington Examiner in a statement. “While I strongly disagree with Sen. Ernst on the Renewable Fuel Standard, her long-standing position on the side of Iowa corn farmers won’t be overcome in this case.”
Ernst’s announcement comes just one day after she led a bipartisan letter with more than a dozen senators calling on Wheeler to “outright” reject the oil refiners’ petitions.
The agency was considering 52 petitions from small refiners as of last week asking for exemptions from previous years of the biofuels blending requirements, according to an update to the EPA’s RFS dashboard. Those petitions follow a federal appeals court ruling in January that sharply restricted the EPA’s ability to grant exemptions for small refiners.
But to the frustration of Ernst and other corn-state senators, the EPA has not yet indicated how it will implement that court ruling. Nor has the agency said how it will address the small refinery petitions for prior year exemptions.
Biofuels producers and corn-state lawmakers say the “gap petitions” are a way to circumvent the court ruling, which said the EPA couldn’t grant exemptions for refineries whose waivers had lapsed. By petitioning for previous years, refiners are attempting to establish a “continuous chain of exemptions,” even though they weren’t experiencing economic hardship to comply at the time, the bipartisan group of senators said in their recent letter.
Oil refiners, though, argue the law allows small refiners to apply for relief “at any time.” A spokesperson for the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers recently said facilities “have every right under the law to try to correct this with EPA.”
Oil-state senators such as Barrasso have argued the appeals court ruling would have devastating effects on small refiners. Barrasso has sharply criticized the Trump administration for not seeking a rehearing of the case, telling Wheeler during an oversight hearing in May the decision was “inexplicable.”
This isn’t the first time Ernst has blocked an EPA nominee amid tensions over the EPA’s implementation of the RFS. She held up the EPA’s nominee to lead the air office in 2017, successfully securing a commitment from then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt that he wouldn’t seek to cut biodiesel requirements.
“I know that they know we’re watching,” Ernst said of the EPA in a recent interview with the Washington Examiner. “This is an issue I’m very comfortable in talking with President Trump about, so I think if they are smart, they will watch their p’s and q’s and understand that the president has made a commitment to our nation to support the Renewable Fuel Standard.”
