Ten Senate Democrats are waging plagiarism accusations at Trump’s controversial nominee to lead the Council for Environmental Quality.



In a letter sent Tuesday to nominee Kathleen Hartnett White, Democrats on the Committee on Environment and Public Works said she responded to questions from Congress about her opinions on various science and policy issues with 18 stolen answers.

“We are troubled that it appears that you have cut and pasted from the written answers of other nominees in your responses to questions that were submitted to you,” the Senators wrote.

Even before these plagiarism allegations, Democrats on the Senate committee have criticized her qualifications for one of the government’s top environmental roles, running an office that coordinates environmental efforts across agencies and works closely with the White House on related policy and programming.

White is the former chair of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the state’s main environmental department. She’s now the director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Armstrong Center for Energy and the Environment, a conservative think tank that sponsored a climate denial conference last month in Houston and petitioned the EPA in May to review its so-called endangerment finding that carbon dioxide endangers human health and welfare. In this role, she has said climate science is uncertain, criticized the Paris climate agreement, applauded the expansion of fossil fuels, and called renewables “a false hope.”

The letter outlines 18 examples of White submitting responses that match answers from others. In replies to questions about climate change from Sens. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, White wrote on Nov. 8: “If confirmed, I will work to ensure that any regulator actions are based on the most up to date and objective scientific data, including the ever-evolving understanding of the impact that increasing greenhouse gases have on our changing climate.”

As the nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt in January wrote the same sentence in response to a similar climate question from the committee.

