This Week: Polluters’ Lawyer-Turned-EPA Official Exits Amid Investigation

This is your weekly roundup of stories from the swamp, published every Thursday.  Wehrum Resigns: The EPA’s top air quality official announced Wednesday that he would resign after just a year and a half on the job amid an ethics probe into whether he’d helped his former corporate clients in polluting industries. Wehrum likely didn’t feel much need for more time in government, given his crowning achievement is already out of the gate: Last week, the EPA finalized a replacement proposal for the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, the Affordable Clean Energy rule. ACE will allow states to dictate their own energy emissions standards, rather than following standards set by the federal government. For context, this new plan sets an emissions reduction standard that, in The Washington Post’s words, “cuts carbon emissions from power plants by less than half of what experts say is needed to avoid catastrophic global warming.” Trump Swamp has focused on Wehrum before, when the New…