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Utah governor Mike Leavitt will face a grilling later this month when the Senate considers his nomination to head the Environmental Protection Agency. The Republican will have to defend the Bush Administration's environmental record, including last week's revised EPA rules governing pollution at older power plants. Under the old regimen, utilities that wanted to update their plants were required to install extensive pollution controls. The new rules will allow them to upgrade without putting in such equipment...
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is likely to quiz Leavitt about the EPA's post-9/11 announcements on air quality near ground zero. Last month the agency's inspector general determined that the White House added "reassuring statements" to EPA press releases despite the presence of toxic contaminants...
...posts in the federal government are as thankless as the job of running the Environmental Protection Agency. Green groups fly into a rage when they perceive the EPA lowering its protective vigilance;?industries find every regulation?a threat to their bottom lines. Who wouldn't grow weary of these warring factions? Christine Todd Whitman did, and announced last month that she will leave her post as EPA administrator on June 27. The short list of prospective replacements, confirmed by a White House official speaking on condition of anonymity, consists of Tom Skinner, the head of an EPA regional office; Idaho...
...Skinner runs the EPA's Midwestern district, which includes six states from Ohio, west to Illinois and northwest to Minnesota. His relative anonymity, even among liberal beltway EPA watchers, could be a bonus; a blank political slate can trump a documented history. As head of an EPA regional office (and former Illinois EPA chief), Skinner sees to it that states and the companies within them comply with the agency's rules and standards - licensing and inspecting big polluters, and issuing clean-up orders...
...Fisher, Whitman's deputy at EPA, is expected to become acting director later this month. Highly regarded within the agency, Fisher also maintains a good reputation among some prominent environmentalists. But green groups are likely to resist her nomination nonetheless, feeling she is tainted by Bush's policies. She held important posts in the Reagan and first-Bush EPAs. During the Clinton years, she managed the government affairs office for Monsanto, the chemical and biotechnology company. Fisher's candidacy is a hat-tip to her work in the agency and the civil servants below her. But it may only...