White House Taps Transportation Official To Head Chemical Safety Board

President Barack Obama will nominate a Department of Transportation lawyer to become the next chair of the Chemical Safety & Hazard Investigation Board (CSB), the White House announced on March 3.

If confirmed, Vanessa Allen Sutherland, chief counsel for the Pipeline & Hazardous Materials Safety Administration since October 2011, would replace CSB Chairman Rafael Moure-Eraso, whose five-year term expires in June.

Sutherland currently heads a team of lawyers that handles legal, policy, regulatory, and enforcement issues affecting companies that transport hazardous materials.

Prior to joining the Transportation Department, Sutherland worked in the tobacco industry as senior counsel to Altria Client Services from 2008 to 2011 and as counsel to Philip Morris USA from 2004 to 2008. She previously worked in the telecommunications industry, holding multiple legal roles at Digex and MCI, now a part of Verizon Communications.

She is one of two nominees recently selected to join CSB, an independent federal agency charged with investigating serious chemical accidents. In January, Obama nominated Kristen Kulinowski, a researcher at the IDA Science & Technology Policy Institute, to serve on the board.

CSB currently has four Senate-confirmed members for its five positions. But in addition to Moure-Eraso, Mark Griffon, who has served on the board since 2010, is also facing the end of his term in June.

The board has been beset in the past year by a series of management problems, including alleged abuses of power by Moure-Eraso. Several congressional lawmakers have urged him to resign.

“This is a dysfunctional, unfair, and unproductive organization, and good people are suffering,” Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) told Moure-Eraso at a hearing held on March 4 by the House of Representatives Committee on Oversight & Government Reform. “Until you leave this organization, these problems will persist.”

But Moure-Eraso responded that he would remain in office until his planned retirement. “I have work to do,” he told the committee.

Both Democrats and Republicans on the panel assailed Moure-Eraso for the alleged illegal use of private e-mail for government business, canceling unfinished investigations, and creating a toxic work environment that has caused staff attrition.