Environmental Protection Agency administrator Gina McCarthy on Thursday defended the public outreach that provoked the Government Accountability Office to fault the agency for violating laws against government propaganda.
“I think the word ‘propaganda’ is always construed as something horrible,” McCarthy said during a House Agriculture Committee hearing on Thursday. “The propaganda that they were referring to was not that we lobbied Congress … the propaganda issue was that we used the system that [the White House Office of Management and Budget] approves under their guidelines, which was basically a general message saying ‘I really care about clean water.’ And GAO was worried that when other people retweeted that, they didn’t identify it as an EPA message.”
EPA issued those messages in order to create a “virtual flash mob” in support of a controversial revision to a regulation about the waters of the United States, which could extend the agency’s jurisdiction over small bodies of water throughout the country. Congress voted to block the rule, but President Obama vetoed the measure.
In December, the GAO, an independent government watchdog, said that the “virtual flash mob” organized by the EPA “constituted covert propaganda” because it encouraged people to contact lawmakers with their support of the rule without notifying the social media users that the campaign was organized by the EPA.
“Both of the external webpages contained link buttons to contact Congress in support of the proposed rule while several bills were pending that would prevent implementation of the rule,” the GAO wrote in a letter to Congress. “In this context, we view the appeals as urging contact in opposition to pending legislation.”
McCarthy maintained that the agency had done nothing wrong, but said it was drafting a letter in response to GAO’s findings. “I don’t want to minimize it,” she told the panel. “We will pay attention to what GAO said and we do have a letter in the process to meet all obligations. We just disagree that it was a problem.”
