WASHINGTON — On her final day as Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Christie Whitman assured members of Congress that the EPA would do required economic and technical studies before proposing a rule to reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
Despite Whitman's assurance, EPA career staffers say this analysis was put off on orders from agency political appointees -- and the proposal was written in part by utility interests who strongly supported it.
Whitman said in interviews this week that, if she had known the studies of the mercury proposal were not being done, she would have intervened.
But according to a June 27, 2003, response from Whitman made public Thursday by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), she had been alerted to such concerns and promised four Democratic lawmakers that all necessary analyses would be completed by Dec. 15, 2003.
Waxman was one of the lawmakers who received Whitman's letter after inquiring about reports at the time that the analysis had been shelved.
"Her statements now are indefensible," Waxman said. Whitman, a former New Jersey governor, rejected Waxman's criticism as unfounded. She said it was her expectation that the agency would deliver on its commitments to the lawmakers after she departed.
"It was always my understanding that the full process was being followed," she said in an interview. "I was never given any indication that all the numbers weren't being run."
Waxman's criticism, she suggested, was motivated by partisanship. He should have shown similar concern when the Clinton administration only began the process of regulating mercury emissions from power plants after environmentalists filed suit, Whitman said.
The Bush administration emphasizes that its proposal would be the first to regulate this pollution.
But environmentalists and their congressional allies have attacked the EPA's plan and the process that produced it. Some have urged the administration to scrap the proposal because it violated federal requirements that an agency review alternatives and publish its analysis at the time it makes a major regulatory proposal.
"Everyone told EPA they needed to do their homework in writing these mercury standards," Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) said in a statement Thursday. "They intentionally did not, and their plan predictably has turned out to be deeply flawed. The mercury rule should be withdrawn and done again the right way, grounded in sound science."
