Until recently, Kyle Kunkler was the top lobbyist for America’s soybean industry. In that job he once boasted of helping to keep a controversial weedkiller called dicamba in use, likening his back-and-forth with regulators to a tennis match full of “rocketing volleys.”
Now, he is that regulator.
In June, Mr. Kunkler was named the Trump administration’s top official in charge of pesticide policy at the Environmental Protection Agency. Less than a month later, the E.P.A. proposed allowing the use of herbicides containing dicamba, a chemical whose use has twice been restricted by a federal court. Critics of the proposal say it closely aligns with the soybean industry’s priorities.
As the deputy assistant administrator for pesticides, Mr. Kunkler will lead the effort to finalize those plans. He is one of four former industry lobbyists or executives overseeing the E.P.A. office that regulates chemicals including pesticides.
“It’s incredible, the entire leadership of that office comes directly from industry,” said Lori Ann Burd, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, which previously took the E.P.A. to court over dicamba.
Dicamba has become increasingly important to American cotton and soybean farmers to control aggressive “superweeds” that are resistant to other weedkillers. But herbicides containing dicamba tend to drift into neighboring fields, damaging crops or threatening wildlife and trees. In 2016, one farmer murdered another in Arkansas in a dispute about dicamba that had drifted across property lines.
The post From Industry to E.P.A.: Lobbyist Now Oversees Pesticide Rules appeared first on New York Times.
