--For Immediate Release-- Contact: Anna Oman Telephone: 202/234-8494 Mobile: 434/227-0727 Washington, DC — July 26, 2005 — The White House improperly forced the Environmental Protection Agency to put aquatic wildlife at risk at the behest of corporate special interests, OMB Watch told a federal court today. The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) substantially weakened an EPA proposal to protect the trillions of fish and aquatic organisms that are sucked up and killed each year by power plants that use rivers, estuaries, and oceans to cool their systems. OMB Watch filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit today, calling on the court to reject OMB’s interference in the EPA rule. “For some time now, OMB has been interfering with agency rule-making,” explains Robert Shull, director of regulatory policy with OMB Watch. “We hope the court will finally do something about these political intrusions and allow agencies to do the job they were told to do by Congress.” Each year, power plants draw in more than 70 trillion gallons of water for cooling and in the process destroy trillions of aquatic organisms, from plankton to fish and their eggs to sea turtles. These facilities can reduce deaths by more than 90 percent by switching to a “closed-cycle” cooling process. Although EPA is required by the Clean Water Act to require these cooling water intake structures to use the “best technology available to minimize adverse environmental impact,” OMB forced EPA to develop a rule using a completely different standard that emphasized keeping costs down for the corporate special interests such as Cinergy, Edison Electric, and Public Service Electric & Gas that lobbied OMB for weaker rules. Instead of requiring the largest facilities in the most ecologically sensitive areas to meet standards that the new technology would allow and that EPA originally proposed, EPA adopted less protective measures. EPA failed to require closed-cycle cooling at the largest and most harmful plants and allowed industry to lobby state agencies for even weaker guidelines for specific facilities. OMB Watch’s brief, authored by Georgetown Law Professor Lisa Heinzerling, argued that OMB “foisted upon the Environmental Protection Agency an invalid interpretation of” the Clean Water Act, and thus the agency’s rulemaking “deserves no deference” from the courts. ###