Whitehouse Opening Statement at NRC, EPA Nominations Hearing

Washington, D.C.-Today, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Ranking Member of the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee, delivered the following opening statement at today's hearing, "Hearing on the Nominations of Ho Nieh to be a Member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Douglas Troutman to be Assistant Administrator for Toxic Substances of the Environmental Protection Agency."

Ranking Member Whitehouse's full remarks, as prepared for delivery:

Thank you, Madam Chair. Welcome to both witnesses.

Mr. Nieh, I appreciate your willingness to return to public service, to an agency where you devoted nearly 20 years of your career. Be warned, this is not the same agency you left four years ago.

Over the past nine months, institutional and technical knowledge have been gutted. Dozens of senior managers and staffers have left or been pushed out. The Administration's hiring freeze has left the NRC unable to backfill positions.

At the same time, there's a rush to roll back agency safety protocols and carry out organizational restructuring. Unqualified DOGE staffers have moved into offices at NRC headquarters to "make recommendations" and "consult" with the agency. Despite calls for less political interference and a return to independence, more DOGE members keep appearing at the NRC. Yet another - number eight -- arrived at the NRC last month. Department of Energy influence erodes the firewall that was the very purpose for the NRC's creation.

Another cloud hangs over the Commission. You have been nominated to fill the unexpired term of Commissioner Chris Hanson, fired without cause in June - the first Commissioner fired in the agency's 50-year history, signaling influence. Fossil fuel operatives are infiltrating the agency, with every motive to obstruct and delay new technologies that will displace fossil fuel's polluting electrons.

All this turbulence at the NRC comes at a pivotal moment, when the U.S. needs to deploy more nuclear power, safely, to meet future electricity demand and cut greenhouse gas emissions; when the NRC anticipates new reactor applications on a scale it has never before experienced. It must be able to review these applications in an efficient, predictable, and timely manner.

Most importantly, the public must have confidence that its review is based solely on ensuring their safety. The success of the nuclear industry depends upon that confidence.

Mr. Nieh, you are well qualified to serve on the Commission, based on your naval nuclear reactor training and decades of experience at the NRC, at international regulatory agencies, and in the private sector. But you must uphold the NRC's safety mission, along with the other Commissioners. You all must have the fortitude to stand up to political pressures that shunt safety aside for expediency.

My only reservation about your nomination, Mr. Nieh, is whether you can and will do that. I look forward to your testimony and answers to the Committee's questions.

Mr. Troutman, the nominee for the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention at the EPA, has predictably spent his entire career-more than two decades-as a lobbyist for oil, gas, and chemical interests, for influence groups out to weaken protections against dangerous chemicals, groups aping the fossil fuel disinformation campaign to undermine science, capture regulatory agencies, and obstruct efforts aimed at protecting people from pollution.

He will be the third industry operative in the office he has been nominated to lead. And he has stock in the very companies he's supposed to regulate-Dow, Procter & Gamble, and Ecolab. It is clear where his loyalty will lie.

Mr. Troutman will be one more industry proxy embedded at the polluter-captured EPA, out to tilt the scales toward industry profits and away from transparency, public health, and safety; out to protect industry secrecy and profits, not to protect the American people from toxic chemical dangers. This is what corruption looks like.

I plan to oppose his confirmation.