E.P.A. Promised ‘a New Day’ for the Agriculture Industry, Documents Reveal<br />They also said there was a need for “a reasonable approach to regulate this pesticide,” which is widely used in Washington State, and<br />that they wanted “the farming community to be more involved in the process.”<br />According to the documents, Mr. Pruitt “stressed that this is a new day, a new future, for a common-sense approach to environmental<br />protection.” He said the new administration “is looking forward to working closely with the agricultural community.”<br />Three days before Donald J. Trump’s inauguration, Dow Chemical had separately submitted a request to the agency to reject the petition<br />to ban chlorpyrifos, calling the scientific link between the childhood health issues and the pesticide unclear, agency records show.<br />WASHINGTON — In the weeks before the Environmental Protection Agency decided to reject its own scientists’ advice to ban a potentially harmful pesticide, Scott Pruitt, the agency’s head, promised farming industry executives who wanted to keep using the pesticide<br />that it is “a new day, and a new future,” and that he was listening to their pleas.<br />She added that the agency was examining “scientific concerns with the methodology used by the previous administration.”<br />The emails show that as late as March 7, Wendy Cleland-Hamnett, the acting head of the E. P.A.’s office of chemical safety, was presenting<br />the top political staff with options for how to handle the decade-old petition from an environmental group requesting the ban.<br />The next day, Ryan Jackson, Mr. Pruitt’s chief of staff, wrote to another political appointee<br />that he had “scared” the agency’s career staff, suggesting that he had made clear the direction that the political staff wanted to go — and given the career staff explicit verbal orders to prepare documents explaining why the agency had shifted its position.
