"A former top EPA political appointee expected to return to the agency as chief of staff helped broker an unusual deal that ultimately gave two manufacturers years longer to cut health-threatening emissions, recently disclosed emails indicate.

With a boost from a powerful senator and not long after joining EPA in early 2017 as a senior adviser on air issues, Mandy Gunasekara was in repeated contact with a lobbyist for Cabot Corp., the Boston-based maker of a sooty material known as carbon black, the records show.

The company was seeking to push back the deadlines of a 2013 consent decree requiring new pollution controls on its plants. While its campaign didn't bear fruit until late that year, Gunasekara appears to have at least played an early supporting rule."

Sean Reilly reports for Greenwire February 20, 2020. [2]