Story by: John Gallagher, Washington Correspondent @ FreightWaves.com

A scathing report by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office of Inspector General (OIG) found that the EPA ignored required procedures in developing a proposed rule for glider trucks and that the White House attempted to impede the OIG’s investigation.

The EPA, under former administrator Scott Pruitt, had attempted in 2017 to exempt glider kits from Phase 2 emissions rules developed under the Obama administration after three companies — Fitzgerald Glider Kits, Harrison Truck Centers Inc. and Indiana Phoenix Inc. — petitioned EPA to repeal the Phase 2 requirements for glider kits, glider vehicles and rebuilt engines installed in gliders. The rule set standards for gliders beginning Jan. 1, 2018.

The OIG’s report, released on Dec. 5, found that EPA “failed to develop required cost and benefit analyses and to assess air quality impacts” on children’s health. The OIG also found that EPA officials, under Pruitt, had directed the glider repeal rule “be promulgated as quickly as possible,” according to the report. In addition, the OIG revealed in its report that the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) “refused to provide the OIG with specific responses or documentation related to OIG questions” regarding OMB’s involvement in the proposed rulemaking.

“In April 2019, the acting EPA inspector general notified both the OMB director and Congress that the OMB failed to respond to our request for information, which ‘constitutes a clear impediment to our audit,’” OIG asserted.

U.S. Senators Tom Carper, D-Delaware, and Tom Udall, D-New Mexico, who called for an investigation into the proposed repeal last year, said the OIG report “revealed the troubling extent to which the Trump EPA went to break the law” for political benefactors.

Story continues HERE @ freightwaves.com

Source and credits: freightwaves.com / John Gallagher /  iTrucker  / Mario Pawlowski