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BE SMART ABOUT: Steve Gardner, Nominee for Head Coal Mine Regulator
BE SMART ABOUT is our unfortunate series highlighting examples of those in power who you need to stay informed about so you can share this knowledge and together we can Be Smart and Actively Dissent.
Today we discuss Steve Gardner, Trump’s choice to head a federal coal mine regulator. Like most of his nominees, Gardner is a vocal critic of the very agency he’s being asked to lead!
Gardner is a longtime coal industry consultant, and he has called the agency’s marquee Obama-era regulation the product of “one of the most disingenuous and dishonest efforts put forward by a government agency.”
He runs an engineering firm that produced a report as part of the process of preparing that regulation, and the agency deemed it so shoddy that it cut ties with Gardner’s company.
Now he’s the nominee to head that agency, the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement.
To be clear, Gardner is owned by the coal industry and is being nominated to interpret and enforce the rules intended to protect our people who are employed or impacted by these same coal industry firms.
State and federal officials at the time harshly criticized a draft report produced jointly by Gardner’s firm, ESCI, and other contractors. They blasted it as “nonsensical,” “junk,” “inaccurate and incomplete,” and “a piece of crap.” Some OSMRE staff members went so far as to accuse Gardner of trying to sabotage the regulation his firm was hired to help develop.
ECSI was... hired to analyze the environmental and economic impact of various proposals for the Stream Protection Rule. ECSI worked principally with the coal industry [and] OSMRE officials hoped [they] would serve as a counterweight to [reports] representing environmental interests.
By the fall of that year, state and federal officials had begun to express doubts about whether the contractors were up to the task. “If this had come from one of my entry-level students (when I taught college hydro), I would have failed them,” OSMRE scientist Debbie Dale wrote, describing a section of the draft report assigned to ECSI. She called it the “most poorly written ‘professional’ document” she had ever seen. Eight state regulators wrote a letter to OSMRE Director Joseph Pizarchik, calling it “often nonsensical and difficult to follow.”
You can not make this stuff up and it's sickening - because it literally will sicken real people and cost them their health and potentially lives.
The full article linked below from ProPublica has significantly more information on Gardner and his deceptive actions. He should have no role in our government.