Top regulatory officials met with agricultural and chemical industry representatives dozens of times in the first few months after President Donald Trump took office in January, government records show — meetings that were followed by a series of regulatory rollbacks and a downplaying of pesticide concerns by the administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) Commission.
From February to mid-May, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) leaders accepted meetings with representatives from at least 50 industry associations and companies, including agricultural and chemical giants such as Bayer, Corteva, BASF, Dow and the agrichemical lobbying group CropLife America, as well as the American Soybean Association, the National Cotton Council and others.
The meetings also included energy giants like ExxonMobil, Phillips 66, and companies working in plastics or chemical production such as Occidental Chemical Corporation. Some scheduled meetings involved representatives from multiple companies and their legal counsel or lobbyists.
Notably, the industry meetings involved former industry insiders who now are in top positions at the EPA: Nancy Beck, formerly an executive at the American Chemistry Council who is now the EPA’s principal deputy assistant administrator in the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, and Lynn Ann Dekleva, who previously worked at DuPont and as a lobbyist at the American Chemistry Council and is now the deputy assistant administrator of the same EPA office.