For the second time since his nomination, the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee voted Feb. 7 to approve former coal industry lobbyist Andrew Wheeler as deputy administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The panel voted 11-10 to send Wheeler's nomination to the full Senate. The committee voted to advance Wheeler's nomination in November 2017, but the White House had to resubmit his nomination after the full Senate failed to vote on the nominee before the end of that year.
Wheeler is a principal at Faegre Baker Daniels Consulting and co-leads the firm's energy and natural resources practice. Before that, he served as majority staff director, minority staff director and chief counsel at the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, including under former chairman U.S. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla.
EPA Deputy Administrator nominee Andrew Wheeler. Source: Faegre Baker Daniels |
Wheeler's nomination has drawn scrutiny from Democrats and environmental groups who are critical of his past coal industry ties. Although Wheeler deregistered as a lobbyist in August 2017, he previously represented coal producer Murray Energy Corp. in regulatory matters before the federal government and attended a meeting with Murray representatives at the U.S. Department of Energy to discuss a grid resilience proposal.
That proposal, which the DOE released in September 2017, called for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to craft a rule ensuring plants with at least 90 days of onsite fuel supply could recover all their costs plus a return on investment in certain competitive power markets if those plants are not already subject to cost-of-service agreements. The proposed rule would have largely benefited coal and nuclear plants capable of storing fuel onsite, but FERC rejected the request amid complaints from natural gas and renewable power groups that such a rule would undermine competitive power markets and cost consumers more money.
Despite attending the DOE meeting with Murray Energy, Wheeler said he was not involved in crafting the DOE proposal and did not help Murray form a list of regulatory priorities, including the repeal of carbon-cutting regulations and a reexamination of the EPA's finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare.

