Trump Tried to Cut Agency That Investigates Oil, Gas Accidents. Will He Do It Again?

The federal agency responsible for investigating chemical accidents at industrial facilities, including oil refineries like those in the Bay Area, is at risk of being shut down under the second Trump administration.

In 2019, then-President Donald Trump tried and failed to use the budget process to shut down the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, better known as the CSB. He could try it again, as he’s repeatedly said he plans to increase oil and gas production with a deregulatory agenda.

“Starting on Day 1, I will approve new drilling, new pipelines, new refiners, new power plants, new reactors, and we will slash the red tape,” Trump said in early September.

The CSB has investigated major disasters like the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling explosion and leak that lasted for several months in 2010 and the Bio-Lab explosion and fire in Georgia earlier this year.

In the Bay Area, it investigated the explosion and fire at Chevron’s Richmond refinery in 2012 that sent 15,000 people to hospitals, most of them with breathing problems. More recently, it investigated safety violations that resulted in a fire that injured a worker last year at Marathon Petroleum’s Martinez Renewable Fuels refinery.

“They’re the folks who show up and just get to the facts and get to the root cause, hold people accountable,” said Rep. Mark DeSaulnier (D-Concord), who was a Contra Costa County supervisor when his predecessor, George Miller, helped create the CSB in the 1990s.

While local agencies like the Bay Area Air Quality Management District and the California Air Resources Board keep tabs on refineries, the CSB’s reports often offer more detail and are released faster than those from other agencies.

DeSaulnier — who also supported many environmental protections when he served on the California Air Resources Board and BAAQMD — said the CSB is vital to the health of the nation, as its findings have helped usher in regulations that have made it safer for workers, the environment and human health.

Should Trump attempt to get rid of the CSB a second time, DeSaulnier said he’ll fight back.

“He’s basically taking the police officer off the beat at the federal level for polluters. He’s saying, ‘Go ahead and pollute. Go ahead and risk your employees’ and your neighbors’ lives. That’s fine with us. Nobody’s going to be watching,’” DeSaulnier said. “I will. I will fight that tooth and nail.”

Should the CSB be terminated, “the likelihood of somebody dying goes up in our case” because there will be a push to lower regulations to compete with places with lower environmental standards, DeSaulnier said, using Louisiana and Thailand as examples.

Unlike the Environmental Protection Agency or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the CSB’s investigatory functioning is free of typical rulemaking, which allows it to investigate multiple facets of an industrial accident, including workplace safety issues and chemical releases that may have harmed the outside community.

Congress also gave it autonomy so that it isn’t beholden to any other agency or the executive branch.

Still, the president appoints the CSB’s members. It is a five-member board, but two seats are vacant — and the current three members of the board all have terms that expire before the end of Trump’s second term.

While Trump has yet to formally call for the end of the CSB, he has already told one of his Cabinet appointments, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a former environmental lawyer tapped to lead the Department of Health and Human Services — “to stay away from the liquid gold,” alluding to oil and gas.

DeSaulnier said that the “real gold” is renewable energy and that more oil refineries are turning greener, evidenced by two of the four refineries in Contra Costa County — the PBF refinery in Martinez and the Phillips 66 refinery in Rodeo — announcing last year that they were switching to processing plant-based diesel fuels.

“I think the economic model is very compelling,” DeSaulnier said, adding that if the U.S. doesn’t continue to transition to renewable energy, it’ll be far behind other countries already doing so.

Even Exxon Mobil’s CEO pushed back against Trump’s reliance on fossil fuels as the company attempts to transition to other forms of energy because “investors know where the future is, and they know where the return on investment is,” DeSaulnier said.

For Trump to gut or cut the CSB and continue to push for less regulation on the fossil fuel industry “is just perfect madness,” DeSaulnier said. “But I think he will do it.”