Though he has openly disparaged much of his agency’s mission, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has remained steadfastly enthusiastic about Superfund, the federal program responsible for cleaning up some of the country’s most contaminated industrial sites. The EPA budget brief released in February said the agency would “accelerate the pace of cleanups” and make an additional 102 Superfund sites and 1,368 brownfield sites “ready for use” by September 30, 2019. That move follows Pruitt’s creation of a “Superfund task force,” which laid out the program’s priorities in July and, in December, issued a list of 21 sites to be fast-tracked for cleanup. Yet even as he’s offered up these promises, some of Pruitt’s budgetary and hiring decisions have threatened the possibility that he’ll be able to fulfill them. The EPA’s proposed 2019 budget would cut the enforcement staff necessary to track down polluters and hold them accountable. Perhaps even more undermining to the program are the people Pruitt has chosen to run it. First there was Albert Kelly, a former banker who had contributed to Pruitt’s campaigns and whose bank had given him loans, appointed to head the Superfund task force last May despite the fact that he had no previous environmental experience. And now comes Trump’s nomination for Kelly’s boss at the office responsible for managing hazardous waste: Peter Wright, a man with an extensive history with Superfund — fighting EPA cleanups on behalf of polluters.

A work crew contracted by the EPA removes debris from the Gowanus Canal, a Superfund site in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Oct. 24, 2016. Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Defending the Companies That Create Hazardous Waste From the beginning, the government’s efforts to remediate lead smelters, mines, paper mills, refineries, landfills, and the like under the Superfund program have been dogged by delays. Superfund was created in 1980 to remediate the most egregious industrial messes that companies were unable or unwilling to clean up themselves. At first, the program was mostly paid for by a tax on the chemical and oil industries. But the rate of cleanup got infinitely worse after 1995, when Congress allowed that tax to expire, leaving taxpayers to foot the bill. The number of completed Superfund cleanups (of sites not owned by the federal government) dropped from 80 in 2000 to 13 in 2013, according to a 2015 report by the Government Accountability Office. While presidential administrations have come and gone, hundreds of communities have awaited the removal of dangerous chemicals for decades as they languished on the ironically named “National Priorities List.” Scott Pruitt promised to fix that. But his first step was to appoint someone to head up his Superfund reform initiative whose experience with Superfund sites seemed to be limited to living near one. Like about half of the more than 1,300 Superfund sites, the Wilcox Oil site in Albert Kelly’s hometown, Bristow, Oklahoma, was polluted by companies that no longer exist. It’s been 96 years since Albert Rollestone sold Continental Petroleum, one of the companies that originally operated on the land that is now the Wilcox site. In the early 1900s, Rollestone shared a house with Kelly’s grandfather, a banker whose fortune came partly from oil. Both men profited from the Bristow oil boom. Rollestone, whose bank eventually merged with one the elder Kelly ran, went on to live “on a prominent Easy Street corner,” as the magazine Petroleum Age wrote at the time, and Kelly’s community bank, now known as SpiritBank, remains in operation. While Continental and the six other companies that originally operated on the land have long since ceased to exist, their pollution remained. On a chilly Tuesday last month, it took the form of black goo that had oozed up from the ground and hardened into tarry patches dotting Glen Jones’s backyard. Jones, 73, hoped for a peaceful retirement on his 20-acre property when he bought it 14 years ago. That was before the EPA found elevated concentrations of lead, arsenic, 2-methylnaphthalene, and the carcinogen benzo(a)pyrene in the 125-acre swath of Bristow that includes his backyard and, in 2013, declared it a Superfund site. For most of the past year, while the position above him has remained vacant, Kelly, the grandson of Rollestone’s business associate, has been running the $1 billion program that oversees the cleanup of Superfund sites, including the one in Bristow. While Kelly is new to this professional world, Wright, Trump’s nominee to head the EPA’s Office of Land and Emergency Management, has an extensive track record with hazardous waste: For the last quarter-century, he has defended companies responsible for some of the biggest of these industrial disasters, including Dow Chemical, where he has worked for more than 18 years, and Monsanto, where he worked for seven years before that. The Senate has yet to schedule Wright’s confirmation hearing. If confirmed, he would oversee emergency response as well as cleanups under the Superfund program, which is mostly used for abandoned industrial sites, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which is designed for sites that are still in use. Together, Dow and DuPont, which merged in 2017, are responsible for the remediation of nearly 200 Superfund sites and more than 300 sites being cleaned up under other laws, including the RCRA, according to DowDuPont’s Securities and Exchange Commission filing. Monsanto is associated with at least 100 Superfund sites and seven RCRA sites, according to the EPA website. A spokesperson for Monsanto could not confirm the number of sites the company has been involved in remediating. While Pruitt has promised to speed cleanups, as an attorney representing companies that have to pay cleanup costs, part of Wright’s job has been to avoid liability. Among the complicated environmental messes Dow is now cleaning is Rocky Flats, where the company manufactured triggers for nuclear weapons. An EPA and FBI raid of the plant in 1989 led to discoveries that plutonium and tritium had leaked into local water — and spurred the environmental agency to add the site to the Superfund list that same year. Thousands of residents have since sued. In an emailed statement, Dow spokesperson Rachelle Schikorra noted that the EPA closed the Rocky Flats cleanup project in 2006 and that legal cases associated with historical operations of this site have settled.

Photo: Mira Oberman/AFP/Getty Images

But it is a mess in Michigan, surrounding Dow’s headquarters in Midland, that is the company’s “largest and most significant environmental matter,” as Wright’s bio on an industry consulting group webpage points out. The company has released highly toxic dioxins and furans into the Tittabawassee River and other local waters since at least the 1930s, and waste from its Vietnam War-era production of the herbicide Agent Orange added to the river’s chemical stew. The contaminants have flowed into the nearby Saginaw River, the Saginaw Bay, and Lake Huron, ending up at least 50 miles from the plant where they originated. Ethics experts say Wright should recuse himself from work on the Midland site. “You’d worry, potentially, that given the magnitude of the issue and its importance to Dow, that in this revolving-door situation he might favor Dow’s point of view,” said Bruce Green, director of the Louis Stein Center for Law and Ethics at Fordham University. “If I were in his confirmation hearing, I would ask whether he plans to recuse himself.” Kathleen Clark, a professor of legal and government ethics at Washington University School of Law, added that Wright’s role as managing counsel at Dow would seem to trigger more sweeping restrictions on his work. “Legal ethics standards would make it a lifetime ban, if, as is almost certainly the case, he’s learned confidential information from Dow about this,” Clark said. She says the restrictions should go even further. “If he participated or had confidential information in the proceedings involving any of DowDuPont’s other sites, he may need to recuse himself from government work on those as well.” In her statement, Dow’s Schikorra said that Wright was unavailable to comment for this piece but described him as “directly involved in negotiating 14” cleanup agreements with the EPA. “Peter Wright has been the steadfast voice at the table on the mid-Michigan dioxin issues. His in-depth understanding of both regulations and real-world solutions was instrumental in resolving this highly complex legacy issue,” Schikorra said. Schikorra’s statement also said that the company has made “tremendous progress in resolving the mid-Michigan dioxin issue” and noted that Dow is “working cooperatively with, and under the direction of regulatory agencies, to remediate and restore areas impacted by our historical operations. We are focused on resolution and remain committed to protecting the health and well-being of the communities in which we live and work.” While Wright has served as its managing counsel, Dow has argued against strengthening the cleanup standard for dioxin at the Michigan site, slowed the pace of the river’s cleanup, and withheld results of its own research from the state. When the EPA tried to force the company to speed up its process, Dow fought back hard. A decade ago, an EPA regional administrator named Mary Gade got fed up with the company’s resistance to addressing the dioxins in Michigan. In January 2008, Gade, whose region included the Dow headquarters, decided to stop negotiating with the company, which had declined to do some testing requested by the state and the EPA. Gade instead tried to use her emergency powers to compel Dow to clean up the most contaminated waterways. Weeks after the decision to stop negotiating, Dow officials, including Peter Wright, met with Susan Bodine, then an EPA assistant administrator who worked at the agency’s Washington headquarters. According to an emailed letter they sent Bodine after the meeting, the Dow officials requested her help putting matters “back on a constructive track.” In May 2008, Gade said EPA headquarters had told her to resign or be fired; she resigned. Gade didn’t return calls from The Intercept, but at the time of her ousting told the Chicago Tribune, “There is no question, this is about Dow.” Dow spokesperson Schikorra said no one at Dow had any role in Gade’s departure from the EPA. While Wright’s nomination is pending, Susan Bodine is already back at the agency. After spending several years as a lobbyist, she was confirmed to run the EPA’s enforcement office in December.

A small portion of the Dow Chemical plant seen from a park overlook in Midland, Mich., on April 12, 2007. Photo: Bill Pugliano/Getty Images