SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
"How's that swamp draining going again?" (Photo: Defending Our Future/Twitter)
Drain What Swamp? Trump Sends Coal Lobbyist to EPA and Boeing Exec to DoD
'Personnel is policy'
Mar 17, 2017
A coal lobbyist and a Boeing executive are to be nominated to deputy positions at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Defense (DoD), respectively, making President Donald Trump's campaign promises to "drain the swamp" continue to look like a lot of hot air.
Andrew Wheeler, the lobbyist to be nominated as deputy EPA administrator, works for an oil and gas industry-serving law firm and is a registered lobbyist for Murray Energy, the largest privately-owned coal company in the country, according to The Hill. He also served on the staff of climate change denier Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), and will join several fellow former Inhofe staffers at Scott Pruitt's EPA.
Patrick Shanahan, meanwhile, is a top Boeing executive with no military or political experience. "He is, however, familiar with defense procurement from the business side," reports the Seattle Times, which notes that Shanahan "ran Boeing's military rotorcraft division in Philadelphia for two and a half years, where he was responsible for the Apache and Chinook helicopter programs as well as the V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor airplane." (On Friday, it was reported that an attack possibly from a U.S.-made Apache helicopter killed 31 Somali refugees off the coast of Yemen.)
The coal lobbyist and Boeing executive join former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson and a plethora of former Goldman Sachs executives in Trump's cabinet. These latest hires continue to confirm suspicions that Trump's policy isn't so much to drain the swamp, as to fill it.
Trump's broken promises to drain the swamp weren't forgotten by observers:
"Personnel is policy," as Washington Post correspondent James Hohmann tweeted:
On January 20th, it begins...
Political revenge. Mass deportations. Project 2025. Unfathomable corruption. Attacks on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Pardons for insurrectionists. An all-out assault on democracy. Republicans in Congress are scrambling to give Trump broad new powers to strip the tax-exempt status of any nonprofit he doesn’t like by declaring it a “terrorist-supporting organization.” Trump has already begun filing lawsuits against news outlets that criticize him. At Common Dreams, we won’t back down, but we must get ready for whatever Trump and his thugs throw at us. Our Year-End campaign is our most important fundraiser of the year. As a people-powered nonprofit news outlet, we cover issues the corporate media never will, but we can only continue with our readers’ support. By donating today, please help us fight the dangers of a second Trump presidency. |
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
A coal lobbyist and a Boeing executive are to be nominated to deputy positions at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Defense (DoD), respectively, making President Donald Trump's campaign promises to "drain the swamp" continue to look like a lot of hot air.
Andrew Wheeler, the lobbyist to be nominated as deputy EPA administrator, works for an oil and gas industry-serving law firm and is a registered lobbyist for Murray Energy, the largest privately-owned coal company in the country, according to The Hill. He also served on the staff of climate change denier Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), and will join several fellow former Inhofe staffers at Scott Pruitt's EPA.
Patrick Shanahan, meanwhile, is a top Boeing executive with no military or political experience. "He is, however, familiar with defense procurement from the business side," reports the Seattle Times, which notes that Shanahan "ran Boeing's military rotorcraft division in Philadelphia for two and a half years, where he was responsible for the Apache and Chinook helicopter programs as well as the V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor airplane." (On Friday, it was reported that an attack possibly from a U.S.-made Apache helicopter killed 31 Somali refugees off the coast of Yemen.)
The coal lobbyist and Boeing executive join former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson and a plethora of former Goldman Sachs executives in Trump's cabinet. These latest hires continue to confirm suspicions that Trump's policy isn't so much to drain the swamp, as to fill it.
Trump's broken promises to drain the swamp weren't forgotten by observers:
"Personnel is policy," as Washington Post correspondent James Hohmann tweeted:
A coal lobbyist and a Boeing executive are to be nominated to deputy positions at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Defense (DoD), respectively, making President Donald Trump's campaign promises to "drain the swamp" continue to look like a lot of hot air.
Andrew Wheeler, the lobbyist to be nominated as deputy EPA administrator, works for an oil and gas industry-serving law firm and is a registered lobbyist for Murray Energy, the largest privately-owned coal company in the country, according to The Hill. He also served on the staff of climate change denier Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), and will join several fellow former Inhofe staffers at Scott Pruitt's EPA.
Patrick Shanahan, meanwhile, is a top Boeing executive with no military or political experience. "He is, however, familiar with defense procurement from the business side," reports the Seattle Times, which notes that Shanahan "ran Boeing's military rotorcraft division in Philadelphia for two and a half years, where he was responsible for the Apache and Chinook helicopter programs as well as the V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor airplane." (On Friday, it was reported that an attack possibly from a U.S.-made Apache helicopter killed 31 Somali refugees off the coast of Yemen.)
The coal lobbyist and Boeing executive join former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson and a plethora of former Goldman Sachs executives in Trump's cabinet. These latest hires continue to confirm suspicions that Trump's policy isn't so much to drain the swamp, as to fill it.
Trump's broken promises to drain the swamp weren't forgotten by observers:
"Personnel is policy," as Washington Post correspondent James Hohmann tweeted:
We've had enough. The 1% own and operate the corporate media. They are doing everything they can to defend the status quo, squash dissent and protect the wealthy and the powerful. The Common Dreams media model is different. We cover the news that matters to the 99%. Our mission? To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good. How? Nonprofit. Independent. Reader-supported. Free to read. Free to republish. Free to share. With no advertising. No paywalls. No selling of your data. Thousands of small donations fund our newsroom and allow us to continue publishing. Can you chip in? We can't do it without you. Thank you.