AUSTIN – Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and other attorneys general have written a letter to the Administrator of the Environment Protection Agency Scott Pruitt calling for an end to the "federal overreach" of the Environmental Protection Agency, according to a press release from Paxton's office.
In a letter that included signatures from 16 other state attorneys general, Paxton said in a press release that the government agency had been acting unlawful during the Obama-era.
The letter claims that the EPA had disregarded the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and instead imposed federal regulations in an area of governance that should have been left to the state.
One example of such behavior noted in a press release from Paxton involved the Texas plan regarding haze.
“The plan imposed reasonable regulations on such things as power generators in the state to ensure air quality was sufficiently high to allow good visibility. The Agency rejected the State’s plan, imposed a federal plan costing $2 billion without achieving any visibility changes,” the letter states.
The letter stated that Texas challenged the plan in a D.C. court, which sided with the state. The agency responded with a different regional haze rule “almost as bad as the first,” according to the letter.
It calls to account the actions of the agency, which the authors speculate are politically driven.
“These actions show that the agency ignored the efforts of the state, perhaps blinded by the belief that good results can only result from top down management by the federal government. Or worse, the prior administration’s agenda and policy goals drove the Agency’s decision rather than the requirements of the statute,” the letter states
It also noted that the “recent overreach by the agency amounts to a striking departure from the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. Respectfully, we ask that you consider the steps that the agency may take to restore the principles of cooperative federalism embodied in these important statutes.”
The other states that signed the letter include Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Wyoming, Kentucky and Mississippi.