The Lever - 💳 X marks the corruption

🔥️‍ Today’s Lever Story (full article here and attached below): You might want to look up chemical disaster risks in your neighborhood while you still can.

🎧 On Lever Time: Is Elon really in charge?

⬇️ Spend four minutes reading this 915-word newsletter to learn about:

• Trump’s Friday Night Massacre killing off the antifraud police scrutinizing Musk.
• Musk’s business deal that came just before he targeted a regulatory agency.
• MAGA’s weekend temper tantrum over the courts.
• Google quietly erasing a line from its policy website.

⚖️ MAGA’s weekend temper tantrum over the courts. JD Vance, Elon Musk, Sen. Tom Cotton, White House aide Stephen Miller, and chalkboardist Glenn Beck spent the weekend insisting that a federal judge had no right to block Musk and his minions from accessing millions of Americans’ private records in the federal payment system. They now argue judges have no right to limit the executive branch. Notably, they never made this argument when a Trump-packed court spent four years blocking much of President Biden’s agenda.

☠️ X marks the corruption. Late last month, Elon Musk’s company X announced a deal with Visa to create a digital wallet and peer-to-peer payment system through the social media platform. Days later, Musk is signaling that he and his DOGE team are working to kill the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which polices peer-to-peer payment apps and had been planning tougher oversight of such systems to make sure they don’t steal your money. The Trump administration is now trying to completely shut down the agency.

• The push to better regulate payment apps intensified after thousands of Americans lost their savings in the bankruptcy of a tech company backed by the financial firm of CFPB critic Marc Andreessen, a Trump super PAC donor whose firm provided financing for Musk’s takeover of Twitter and an investor in a lending company nailed by the CFPB. Read The Lever’s past coverage.

🫢 What is Google up to? Last week, Google premiered Gemini 2.0 to the public as its new-and-improved “workhorse model” AI, “optimal for high-volume, high-frequency tasks at scale.” A Lever investigation last year found the company’s AI-powered search responses already guzzle as much electricity as the entire country of Ireland. Meanwhile, last week Google also quietly erased a line of policy from its website promising its artificial intelligence won’t be used to develop weapons or surveillance. Hmm.

NBC News (01/28/2025)

New York shields abortion providers. The Empire State moved to strengthen protections for doctors who mail abortion pills, days after a New York physician was indicted for prescribing and sending the pills to a pregnant minor in Louisiana. Gov. Hochul signed a bill on Feb. 3 that permits doctors to omit their names from prescriptions for abortion pills and instead use the names of their medical practices. Between April and June of last year, providers offered nearly 10,000 medication abortions each month thanks to shield laws.

Elon Musk speaks at a presidential inauguration event on behalf of President Donald Trump. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

A Friday night massacre. On a recent chilly Friday evening just weeks into his second term, Trump (likely illegally) fired more than a dozen inspectors general, independent watchdogs charged with auditing allegations of waste, fraud, and abuse of power. At least five of those inspectors general came from agencies currently leading or that previously led investigations into Elon Musk’s businesses, which have raked in more than $15 billion worth of government contracts.

Terminating the cops whose agencies police Musk. The Agriculture Department’s fired IG was probing alleged animal abuse at Musk’s brain implant company Neuralink. The Pentagon’s fired IG had reportedly opened a review into Musk’s contacts with foreign leaders. The Transportation Department’s fired IG was the top cop at an agency overseeing several probes into Tesla over its remote and self-driving vehicles. The EPA’s fired IG oversaw an agency that had multiple lawsuits against Tesla. And the Labor Department’s fired IG policed an agency managing 17 open investigations against Musk’s companies.

Ignoring the IG law. In a letter to Trump, Republican Sen. Charles Grassley (Iowa) said the White House did not follow the 2023 law that he wrote, which requires a president to provide Congress reasons for firing IGs, and a 30-day notice before termination.

As Trump tries to shutter the CFPB, it’s important to remember JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon first declared war on the agency after it proposed a rule to help Americans shop for new banks, and move their money to those that offer better interest rates on savings accounts.

~45%

Share of major North American sports teams, collectively valued at $205.5 billion, that have affiliation with or backing from private equity. (Source: Pitchbook)

🦅 Go Birds. In honor of Philadelphia’s victory last night, let us all belt it out like one of the most deranged Attorneys General in American history.

🗓️ We’re almost halfway through. In the meantime, enjoy this pertinent and hilarious salvo on February from longtime St. Louis journalist Kevin Killeen.

⏰ Get busy living, or get busy dying. Every second of your life is the most important second of your life. It’s really true.

Super Bowl announcers last night thanked Rupert Murdoch, saying “we’re all here because of him.” It’s a reminder that it’s a billionaires’ world — we just live (shorter lives) in it.

Firefighters battle a petrochemical fire at a chemical facility in Texas. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

[View in browser]

The chemical industry is asking the Environmental Protection Agency, now helmed by industry-friendly Trump appointee Lee Zeldin, to hide chemical facilities at the highest risk of disaster and their safety records from public view.

On Jan. 30, more than a dozen chemical industry groups sent a letter to Zeldin demanding he take “urgent action” to roll back Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) oversight of facilities that are at the highest risk for chemical disasters. The trade groups also requested the agency “immediately shut down” a government website that makes public where these facilities are located and what dangerous toxins they hold.

Each year, dozens of chemical accidents occur at these high-risk facilities, sometimes forcing entire communities to evacuate or shelter in place. In June 2023, a massive chemical fire at one of these plants in Southwest Louisiana, a region where such chemical accidents are particularly frequent, sent a plume of toxic gas into the air and forced residents within three miles of the facility to shelter in place. Yet reducing EPA oversight of these facilities has for years been a priority for chemical lobbyists.

The chemical lobby’s new letter is the latest industry push to unwind environmental protections instated under the Biden administration. And chemical interests could find an ally in Zeldin, who voted against measures to crack down on cancer-causing “forever chemicals” during his time in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Zeldin has already received the enthusiastic endorsement of chemical lobbyists. The American Chemistry Council, the chemical industry’s biggest lobbying group, urged lawmakers to support Zeldin’s nomination in January, saying his record in Congress showed he was a “thoughtful leader who understood you can protect the environment and human health without imposing unreasonable and unnecessary regulations.”

Keep your data private.

Let Incogni get your personal information off the internet. Help protect yourself from identity theft, spam calls, and health insurers raising your rates. Get 55% off an Incogni annual plan by using code LEVER at checkout.

Claim 55% Off Offer Now

The American Chemistry Council was among the signatories of the Jan. 30 letter. Various other industry interest groups also signed on, including the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, the Corn Refiners Association, and the Fertilizer Institute. The lobbyists first asked for a meeting with Zeldin — but they also emphasized that they wanted to see swift action to undo Biden-era regulations on dangerous chemical plants.

“If they were to roll back [the regulations], it would be devastating,” said Darya Minovi, a senior analyst for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a research group. According to Minovi, communities that live near these facilities, which are at high risk of chemical disasters and exposure, had asked “for years” for the strengthened regulations enacted under former President Joe Biden.

At the same time, Minovi added, the chemical industry letter was not a surprise. Chemical lobbyists have for years been fighting regulations meant to prevent chemical disasters — and with Zeldin now in charge of the top federal environmental watchdog, they are launching a brazen new fight.

“They Don’t Want The Public To Know”

Chemical facilities handling the most dangerous, reactive chemicals are required under the Clean Air Act of 1970 to submit risk management plans to environmental regulators, a provision meant to help prevent devastating chemical accidents.

There are hundreds of facilities around the country subject to EPA’s Risk Management Program. Despite decades of mitigation efforts, accidents at these facilities are still concerningly frequent, research has found, and communities that surround them are at high risk for pollution and environmental impacts. 

And as The Lever reported last October, many facilities that process reactive chemicals are not covered by the EPA regulations, like a chemical plant that spewed a toxic plume of chlorine gas in Conyers, Georgia, in September 2024, forcing residents to evacuate. That’s thanks to the chemical industry, which has fought for loopholes in the regulations.

For years, environmentalists fought for the EPA to make public what chemical facilities were covered by its Risk Management Program rule as well as the chemicals that they handled and the safety protocols they had in place. Such transparency was critical for nearby communities and the public, activists argued.

In March 2024, regulators revealed a public website that for the first time allowed viewers to search for high-risk chemical facilities — revealing the toxins they handle and details about past accidents and safety violations.

According to the database, there are 228 high-risk facilities in Los Angeles County alone.

High-risk chemical facilities in Los Angeles County. (EPA Risk Management Plan search tool)

“This is information that the public deserves to know — what the facilities are that are near them, what types of chemicals they deal with,” said Adam Kron, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, an environmental advocacy group. “It’s really vital information, but also very basic information.”

Now, the chemical industry wants to make this information secret again — alleging that making this information public presents security risks for chemical facilities.

But Kron said he was skeptical of the industry’s claims that the website, which contains no confidential or proprietary information, presented security risks. “I think they just don’t want the public to know — because that will force change,” Kron said. And he noted that companies may also be concerned about hits to their reputation when they were forced to reveal accident history or the dangerous chemicals they were using.

As of Feb. 7, the EPA data tool remains online. But as other EPA webpages go dark — like webpages mentioning the climate crisis, as The Lever reported — advocates worry that soon, a critical accountability tool for communities in the vicinity of hazardous chemical plants will also be taken down.

In the letter to Zeldin, the industry also pushed for the EPA to roll back regulations of high-risk chemical facilities that were strengthened under the Biden administration.

For the last several years, as different administrations have come into power, the Risk Management Program rules have been repeatedly strengthened and then repealed. Biden, during his term, restored many of the Obama-era provisions that President Donald Trump repealed during his first administration.

Biden also added new requirements for high-risk chemical plants, like requiring chemical processors to consider the impact of climate change and to upgrade to newer, safer technologies.

These new rules are now the target of the chemical industry.

Help us spread the word! Please forward this email to family and friends.

Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up for free to receive original reporting like this in your inbox every day.