Two appointees of the administration of President Donald Trump at the nation’s pipeline regulator are facing ethics questions from a top lawmaker on the Senate committee that oversees their agency, following ProPublica’s reporting about their ties to the pipeline industry.
Sen. Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington and the ranking member of the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, sent letters on Friday to Ben Kochman, deputy administrator of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, and to Keith Coyle, the agency’s chief counsel. The letters requested records and information about Kochman and Coyle’s interactions with the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America, an influential pipeline industry group. Prior to their appointments to PHMSA, Kochman was a director at INGAA and Coyle provided legal services to the group (as well as to more than 20 other pipeline, oil and gas companies, his financial disclosure shows). Cantwell sent a similar request for records and information to INGAA.
Cantwell’s letters cite a recent ProPublica investigation that found Kochman and Coyle have overseen an unprecedented push to shrink the agency’s regulatory authority, targeting a host of safety and reporting requirements that pipeline safety advocates view as critical. The agency’s pipeline safety enforcement efforts have also fallen precipitously. The changes overwhelmingly align with the interests of INGAA and the pipeline industry.
“This not only raises serious questions about your compliance with federal ethics rules; it indicates the agency is quietly pursuing a reckless safety rollback agenda that will benefit INGAA and weaken the pipeline safety regulations that protect the American public,” Cantwell wrote in her letter to Kochman. “By all accounts, you are letting industry rewrite the rulebook, while simultaneously choosing not to enforce the rules that remain.”
Kochman and Coyle did not respond to a request for comment. A PHMSA spokesperson said that the two officials “are in full compliance with federal ethics requirements.” A spokesperson for INGAA said the organization intends to respond to Cantwell but did not otherwise comment.
The developments at the pipeline regulator are part of a broader deregulatory blitz across PHMSA’s parent agency, the Department of Transportation, that has targeted numerous safety rules opposed by transportation and infrastructure companies. Safety enforcement has also fallen in other divisions of the DOT. Overseeing these changes are dozens of political appointees who previously worked for industries regulated by the department. Some of them disclosed significant investments in transportation companies and adjacent industries. In comments for ProPublica’s initial article, DOT spokesperson Nate Sizemore said that “safety comes first” at the agency and that the department is “slashing duplicative and outdated regulations” and focusing on “enforcing the key rules that actually keep the American people secure.”
The alignment of industry and regulator is clearest at PHMSA. Kochman and Coyle are two of four appointees there who previously worked for the pipeline industry or in closely related fields. (All four also previously worked at PHMSA or elsewhere in the DOT. The other two also did not respond to requests for comment.) Since their return this year, the agency has taken aim at numerous pipeline and hazardous materials safety standards in a flurry of deregulatory rulemaking. Among its recent proposals are limiting the conditions that PHMSA can place on pipeline safety waivers; tripling the monetary value of property damage caused by a hazardous liquid pipeline failure before its operators must report the accident; and raising shipping limits on batteries known to spontaneously explode.
In total, PHMSA has published 23 notices of proposed rulemaking so far this year, which is more than the administration of President Joe Biden published in four years. All of those proposals were signed by Kochman.
Some of the agency’s recent regulatory actions cite INGAA, the trade group for which Kochman used to work. That includes one notice signed by Kochman that references INGAA’s prior criticism of a pipeline rule proposed by the Biden administration — a criticism that Kochman himself submitted while at INGAA.
The agency’s activities under the new administration have alarmed the Pipeline Safety Trust, an advocacy group, whose executive director likened the moves by the industry-connected appointees to “the fox designing the henhouse.” The trust formed in the wake of a pipeline rupture in 1999 that killed three people, two of them children.
PHMSA has also quietly killed two major rulemaking initiatives, one to strengthen regulations for carbon dioxide pipelines, the other to crack down on pipeline leaks. The latter was mandated by the PIPES Act of 2020, which Trump signed into law during his first term.
In her letters, Cantwell asked Kochman and Coyle to provide records documenting communication or meetings they’ve had with INGAA since joining PHMSA, matters from which they’ve sought to recuse themselves and enforcement cases in which PHMSA reduced or dropped possible penalties. Cantwell requested similar records and information from INGAA.
“It is essential that our pipeline safety officials act independently, consistent with federal ethics rules, and free from undue influence by the companies they oversee,” she wrote to the trade group.
