摘要：We explore and contextualize changes at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over the first 6 months of the Trump administration, arguing that its pro-business direction is enabling a form of regulatory capture. We draw on news articles, public documents, and a rapid response, multisited interview study of current and retired EPA employees to (1) document changes associated with the new administration, (2) contextualize and compare the current pro-business makeover with previous ones, and (3) publicly convey findings in a timely manner. The lengthy, combined experience of interviewees with previous Republican and Democratic administrations made them valuable analysts for assessing recent shifts at the Scott Pruitt–led EPA and the extent to which these shifts steer the EPA away from its stated mission to “protect human and environmental health.” Considering the extent of its pro-business leanings in the absence of mitigating power from the legislative branch, we conclude that its regulatory capture has become likely—more so than at similar moments in the agency’s 47-year history. The public and environmental health consequences of regulatory capture of the EPA will probably be severe and far-reaching. Under Administrator Scott Pruitt, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has undergone rapid shifts in its stated priorities, policies, and other practices that have broken with not only the Obama administration but all its past history. Pruitt and other Trump appointees seek what policy scholar David Carpenter describes as “electorally sanctioned pro-business governance.” 1 (p210) Yet what they are actually accomplishing comes closer to what Carpenter, David Moss, and other social scientists term “regulatory capture”: when “regulation is . . . directed away from the public interest and toward the interest of the regulated industry” by “intent and action” of industries and their allies. 1 (p73) Although scholars and activists have criticized the EPA for years—among other reasons, for its susceptibility to industry influence—the speed, ambition, and reach of the new administration’s effort to curb the EPA’s regulatory work exceeds those of its closest pro-business counterparts, the early Reagan and George W. Bush administrations. Drawing on the notion of “public interest” as defined by scientific, policy, and judicial precedents as well as the agency’s long-standing commitments and practices, we argue that the Pruitt-led EPA has moved away from the public interest and explicitly favored the interests of the regulated industries, thereby opening the door to full-blown regulatory capture. The consequences of this for public and environmental health would be far-reaching. Theories of regulatory capture have long occupied an important, if only intermittently active niche in the political economy literature. 2,3 In particular, scholarship on the capture of the federal regulation of financial markets, which emerged in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, provides useful arguments and heuristics for analyzing the EPA under Trump and Pruitt. This research traces regulatory capture back to the financial boom of the 1990s, which boosted the political power of the banking industry. Similarly, we link the recent domestic oil and gas boom in some states (e.g., Oklahoma) to today’s “secretive alliances” 4 between those industries and politicians like Pruitt, who, as attorney general of Oklahoma, sued the EPA 14 times. 5 The scholarship of Moss, Carpenter, and others sets out rigorous criteria for judging whether pro-business federal agencies, like today’s EPA under Pruitt, veers sufficiently from its public obligations to amount to regulatory capture. They maintain that studies of capture must first establish a model of the public interest, and then show a shift in policy toward industry and special interests. Finally, such studies must demonstrate intentional and causal action on the part of industry, motivating this policy shift. Broadly speaking, we define the EPA’s public interest by its statutory mandate to protect human health and the environment. Accumulated judicial verdicts and scientific assessments before January 2017 translated this mandate into concrete directives and rule-making on many health-related issues, from greenhouse gases to pesticides. Importantly, the EPA’s directives, rules, and operations before 2017 often fell short of its mandate, leading to the critiques of scholars, activists, and local communities. 6–8 Some of these critiques are at least superficially echoed by the EPA’s new leadership, such as the demonstration of the agency’s hierarchical command approach to regulation as outdated and a misalignment of environmental governance responsibilities among federal, state, and local authorities. 7 Yet new EPA leadership has thus far aimed at deconstructing, rather than reconstructing, the agency by comprehensively undermining many of the agency’s rules, programs, and policies while also severely undercutting its budget, work capacity, internal operations, and morale. To gather frontline perspectives on the full range of obstacles increasingly imposed on the public-minded pursuit of EPA’s mission, we interviewed EPA employees. Our interviewees are valuable informants and analysts of the current situation because of their lived experience with the agency’s long-standing practices and (for those still at the EPA) a direct, firsthand perspective. Their testimonies illuminate sharp contrasts between the current EPA and earlier ones, under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Our analysis of these interviews—which is supplemented by scholarly and news publications and government documents—reveals not only the strong emotions and opinions among current and former staffers but also a deep understanding of the agency’s multidimensional shift away from a public interest in environmental health to the interests of the regulated industries. A separate contribution of this study is to demonstrate a model for rapid response research, which we define as an urgent, research-based response to unanticipated events: in this case, the new Trump administration and its promised changes to the EPA and to US environmental governance more broadly. 9 During the US presidential primaries, Trump promised to eliminate the EPA “in almost every form,” leaving “only tidbits” intact, and he famously dubbed climate change a hoax. 10 Our team of researchers took these and other words from his EPA transition team seriously and set about to document what we anticipated would be a sweeping and dramatic transformation at the EPA and other federal environmental agencies. Our research agenda includes examining long-term changes to federal science and environmental policy, but, perhaps more unusually for a scholarly project, we have aimed to publicly release our findings in a timely manner. 11 Although our findings are necessarily tentative, they indicate currently unfolding, critical shifts at the EPA and suggest a broad-based research agenda for future studies.
