Congratulations are in order for former Environmental Protection Agency administrator Gina McCarthy. As of this week, she has been tasked with running an environmental group that, for many years, appeared to be running her federal agency.
The Natural Resources Defense Council, a behemoth among environmental nonprofit organizations, has named McCarthy its new president and chief executive officer, effective Jan. 6.
To call NRDC a “behemoth,” though, is an understatement — and to refer to its hiring operation as part of a “revolving door” implies that there is any friction at all between this group and the federal regulatory bodies that it works to influence.
With NRDC sitting atop $182.3 million in revenue and a whopping $349.4 million in net assets, according to its most recent filing with the Internal Revenue Service, McCarthy will play a coveted role in the environmental hierarchy — one that has been rewarded with average annual compensation of $492,000 over the past five years. NRDC has not been shy about using these resources to bend the administrative state to its will.
From 2009 through 2016, the organization spent more than $4.9 million lobbying the federal government, including Ms. McCarthy’s agency directly, on items such as the Waters of the United States, or rule that would have decimated farmers’ ability to control their own land.
McCarthy acknowledged in 2015 that EPA decided to pursue WOTUS after “outside stakeholders asked us to do the rule.” NRDC, one of those stakeholders supportive of the rule, celebrated after its adoption, “Oh, happy day!”
It was a long time coming. High-level staffers from the nonprofit, known as the “NRDC mafia,” began filtering into EPA as soon as President Barack Obama took office.
The nonprofit organization’s political arm also began to flex its muscle, with NRDC Action Fund pumping thousands of dollars into the campaign coffers of powerful Democratic lawmakers. Beneficiaries included House Energy Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, co-author of the ‘Waxman-Markey’ emissions-trading bill endorsed by the group, and vulnerable Democratic Sens. Mark Begich of Alaska, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Gary Peters of Michigan, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, and Mark Udall of Colorado, all of whom voted to confirm McCarthy to her EPA post.
But who needs Congress when you have deferential bureaucrats at the ready? That’s exactly the kind of assistance NRDC had in McCarthy.
Perhaps the best example is the revelation in June 2014 that three staffers at the nonprofit organization drafted the “blueprint” on which the Obama administration relied for drafting the Clean Power Plan, a regulation the New York Times described as “a remarkable victory for the Natural Resources Defense Council.” At a committee hearing the following month, McCarthy, under scrutiny, attempted to distance herself from the organization, claiming, “I have met many more times with utilities than I have the NRDC.”
Her narrative quickly unraveled.
In September 2014, as part of a joint committee investigation, six members wrote a letter to the Administrator, concluding that “NRDC’s unprecedented access to high-level EPA officials allowed it to influence EPA policy decisions and achieve its own private agenda.” One notable piece of evidence: An email between McCarthy and Dan Lashof — one-third of the NRDC trio that drafted the Clean Power Plan’s “blueprint” — about joining her team at EPA. The email was dated March 19, 2009, just days after her nomination as the agency’s assistant administrator.
She was further questioned in July 2015 about emails in which EPA’s policy director asked NRDC to write “a report or two” that would “provide cover for a draft EPA rule on new fossil power plants.” It wasn’t until December that emails obtained by the Energy & Environment Legal Institute revealed the same director had been keeping NRDC and other allies “apprised of internal EPA deliberations,” the Wall Street Journal reported, through the use of a private Yahoo account — a sure sign that the agency’s subordination to this group was even deeper than disclosed.
While this close relationship might have looked like a ‘brag sheet’ to NRDC’s donors, the resulting policies felt more like a nightmare to American families and workers.
In the press release announcing her new position, the former administrator claimed that NRDC “has never been stronger.” That may have been true under the Obama administration. But, thanks to three years of regulatory reforms and a spate of new federal judges who question the wisdom of blanket deference to the administrative state, hopefully, that will never be the case again.
Brian Anderson is founder of the Saguaro Group, an Arizona-based political research firm.
