The Environmental Protection Agency should be sacked for setting up the tests that were fooled by Volkswagen, a Texas lawmaker said Thursday.
Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Texas, said the public should be disappointed in the EPA for not catching the Volkswagen scandal sooner nor being the group that actually caught the German automaker.
The EPA’s budget, which is about $7 billion annually, shows that it has resources, but it took a $70,000 West Virginia University study to catch Volkswagen in the act, he said
“With all due respect, just looking at the situation, I think the American people ought to ask that we fire you and hire West Virginia University to do our work,” Burgess said. “They certainly are much more cost effective than this part of the federal agency.”
Two EPA officials testified Thursday in front of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s oversight subcommittee about the Volkswagen scandal. Earlier in the day, Michael Horn, CEO of Volkswagen in America, appeared in front of the same committee.
Chris Grundler, director of the EPA’s Office of Transportation and Air Quality, said the agency’s budget didn’t have anything to do with missing the scheme.
“I’m not going to blame our budget for the fact that we missed this cheating,” he said.
The EPA is investigating Volkswagen for installing “defeat devices” that allowed vehicles to skirt emissions tests. The devices let popular models, such as the Jetta, know when they were undergoing emissions testing.
The software could tell if a test was taking place based on the position of the vehicle’s steering wheel, the speed the vehicle was traveling, how long the engine was being used and barometric pressure, according to the EPA. The vehicles would reduce emissions of nitrogen oxide during testing and then spew 40 times the legal limit during normal use.
A timeline released by the committee showed that the EPA and the California Air Resources Board were told by Volkswagen in a series of meetings in July that there may be a “second calibration” that ran only during tests. On Sept. 3, Volkswagen officials told the EPA that software had been installed on the vehicles to cheat the tests.
The California Air Resources Board was the lead government agency investigating the case, Grundler said. The EPA is already making changes to how it tests automobiles to be more unpredictable, he said.
“We’ve learned from this episode, for sure,” he said. “We wish we had found it sooner.”
