EPA Promised ‘a New Day’ for the Agriculture Industry, Documents Reveal

"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 that it is “a new day, and a new future,” and that he was listening to their pleas.

Details on this meeting and dozens of other meetings in the weeks leading up to the late March decision by Mr. Pruitt are contained in more than 700 pages of internal agency documents obtained by The New York Times through a Freedom of Information request.

Though hundreds of pages describing the deliberations were redacted from the documents, the internal memos show how the E.P.A.’s new staff, appointed by President Trump, pushed the agency’s career staff to draft a ruling that would deny the decade-old petition by environmentalists to ban the pesticide, chlorpyrifos."

Eric Lipton and Roni Caryn Rabin report for the New York Times August 18, 2017.

SEE ALSO:

"EPA Welcomed Industry Feedback Before Reversing Pesticide Ban, Ignoring Health Concerns" (The Intercept)

"California’s Farm Communities Mobilize To Ban Pesticide" (San Jose Mercury News)

"EPA's Decision Not to Ban Pesticide Chlorpyrifos: The Agency Documents" (DocumentCloud)