Big Oil Wanted Changes To Worker Safety Rule. Emails Show Top Trump Official ‘Agreed.’
In December 2017, the Trump administration rolled out a proposal to gut a key offshore drilling safety regulation, adopted in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, that the Trump administration had cited to justify its plans to open nearly all U.S. waters to oil and gas development.
Newly released emails show that months earlier, the American Petroleum Institute and six other oil industry groups told top officials at the Department of the Interior that they “did not see the need” for the Obama-era Well Control Rule to include oversight from the department’s main offshore energy enforcement arm, and asked regulators to eliminate whole sections of the regulation, which the Obama administration had finalized in 2016 to prevent the next Deepwater Horizon disaster.
In response to the request, Interior Associate Deputy Secretary James Cason thanked the industry groups for their feedback. And Daniel Jorjani ― a Trump appointee later promoted to serve as the agency’s top lawyer ― emailed back just one word: “Agreed.”
The oil industry’s role in shaping the Trump administration’s rulemaking was never in doubt. In its proposed revision, Interior’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement wrote that “oil and natural gas operators raised concerns about certain regulatory provisions that impose undue burdens on their industry” and estimated that the rollback would save industry just shy of $1 billion over a 10-year period.
But the May 17, 2017 email, made public through a Freedom of Information Act request, shows for the first time the extent of industry’s influence over the fine-print details of regulations that are supposed to police it.
“We appreciate the actions of this Administration to eliminate unnecessary burden and to restore certainty and predictability into the offshore permitting and regulatory regimes,” Holly Hopkins, a senior policy adviser at API, wrote in the email.
Hopkins works for the nation’s most...
