Both Former EPA Official and Flint Emergency Manager Pass the Buck on Water Crisis
Two of the officials most directly implicated in poisoning an entire city’s water supply sat before Congress this week, and neither one accepted responsibility for it.
“I Don’t Think Anyone at EPA Did Anything Wrong”
Susan Hedman, who resigned in January as the EPA’s Region 5 administrator overseeing Michigan, told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that her agency’s hands were largely tied by law. “I don’t think anyone at EPA did anything wrong, but I do believe we could have done more,” Hedman testified, describing the agency as operating within what she called a “cooperative federalism framework” under the Safe Drinking Water Act — a structure, she argued, that gives states primary legal authority to enforce drinking water regulations, leaving the EPA with comparatively limited tools to intervene directly.
That explanation did not survive contact with the committee. Chairman Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican, opened the hearing by reading aloud an internal EPA email from Region 5 water division official Debbie Baltazar to colleagues, in which Baltazar wrote, “I’m not so sure Flint is the community we want to go out on a limb for” — a line that hung over the rest of Hedman’s testimony. Chaffetz didn’t soften his verdict afterward: “You screwed up and you ruined people’s lives,” he told her directly, adding that what happened in Flint “was totally avoidable” and that “it’s almost unbelievable how many bad decisions have been made.”
The sharpest rebuttal to Hedman’s testimony, though, came not from a lawmaker but from the scientist who first exposed the crisis. Virginia Tech professor Marc Edwards, whose independent research team identified dangerous lead levels in Flint’s water months before state or federal officials publicly acknowledged the problem, testified immediately after Hedman that she and her agency had acted with “willful blindness … to the pain and suffering of Flint residents, unremorseful for their role in causing this manmade disaster and completely unrepentant and unable to learn from their mistakes.”
“This Is Not a Leadership Issue”
Darnell Earley, the state-appointed emergency manager who oversaw Flint’s city government when officials switched the city’s water source to the Flint River in 2014 — the decision that triggered the crisis — offered his own, differently framed defense. “This is a water treatment issue. This is not a leadership issue,” Earley told the committee, insisting he had been “grossly misled” by experts at both the EPA and Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality, neither of which, he said, ever told him lead was leaching into the city’s pipes. Earley described himself and other Flint officials as “totally dependent” on the technical guidance those agencies provided, arguing it “would have been unreasonable” to expect city leadership to second-guess expert assurances on water chemistry they had no independent means of verifying.
That defense left Earley and Hedman effectively blaming each other’s institutions for the same failure — Hedman pointing to the limits of federal authority under a state-led regulatory system, Earley pointing to the state and federal experts he says failed to warn him. Former Flint Mayor Dayne Walling, also called to testify, added a third variation on the same theme, saying he regretted personally assuring residents the water was safe but maintaining the crisis wasn’t ultimately his fault, since Michigan’s emergency manager law had stripped elected city officials like himself of the budget authority needed to make water infrastructure decisions in the first place.
A City Left Waiting for Accountability
The hearing marked the second time the Oversight Committee had convened specifically to examine EPA’s handling of Flint, following an earlier February 3 session. By the time of this March hearing, elevated lead levels had already been documented in the blood of Flint children — exposure linked by medical researchers to permanent learning disabilities and developmental harm, with no way to reverse the damage after the fact. Flint’s roughly 100,000 residents, a majority-Black population in one of Michigan’s most economically distressed cities, had been drinking, cooking with, and bathing in contaminated water for well over a year by the time federal officials switched the water source back and issued a public health emergency.
For a city still waiting for both accountability and a functioning water system, a congressional hearing where the officials most responsible for the crisis spent their testimony directing blame at each other’s agencies offered little in the way of resolution — only a more detailed public record of exactly how many people, across how many levels of government, had a chance to prevent the crisis and didn’t take it.
For related coverage of government accountability failures, see our piece on the House Oversight hearing’s fallout and California’s environmental accountability efforts, or browse our full Environment archive.