"Before becoming a top official at the Environmental Protection Agency, Aaron Szabo was a lobbyist for the oil and gas industry. Metadata shows he helped draft a trade group’s 2022 letter to the EPA objecting to controls on methane emissions."

"The Trump administration official leading an effort to loosen rules on methane pollution was an unnamed author of key industry arguments against those same rules just four years ago when he was an oil and gas lobbyist.

Aaron Szabo, an assistant administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency, is listed in PDF metadata as the author of a January 2022 comment letter objecting to proposed controls on methane emissions in the oil and gas industry. The letter was submitted to the EPA by the American Exploration and Production Council, which represents some of the industry’s largest emitters of the planet-warming gas, including ConocoPhillips, Diversified Energy and Hilcorp. Szabo’s name does not appear in the document itself, but it can be found in information embedded by the software used to create the PDF file.

Szabo was registered as a lobbyist for one of the AXPC’s lesser-known members, Ovintiv, when he drafted the arguments against the restrictions, which were finalized later in the Biden administration. He has also lobbied for other clients in the oil and chemicals sectors. While he did not hide that work during his confirmation last year as head of the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, he described it in terms that avoided any mention of efforts to influence climate policy: “I learned how regulated entities comply with the federal government’s thousands of regulations and policies. I also saw firsthand that the people working in these companies want to ensure the environment is properly protected.”"

Alex Cuadros reports for ProPublica April 1, 2026. [2]