Welcome to Pay Dirt—exclusive reporting and research from The Daily Beast’s Lachlan Markay on corruption, campaign finance, and influence-peddling in the nation’s capital. For Beast Inside members only.
Stephen Censky spent more than two decades as the soybean industry’s top man in Washington. Now he’s the No. 2 official at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the interests he’s charged with regulating are elated about it.
Internal emails released through a Freedom of Information Act request show that Censky, the deputy secretary of agriculture, has been deeply involved in crafting USDA’s approach to the Renewable Fuel Standard, a federal mandate for the inclusion of biofuels in transportation fuel.
The RFS is a boon for agricultural sectors that produce crops that can be used in such fuels—including corn, sorghum, and yes, soybeans. And while Censky pledged upon assuming office not to participate in “particular matters” affecting the National Soybean Association, which he led for 21 years, he is not barred from advancing policies that would, incidentally, benefit his former employer or its member companies.
And that, it appears, is what he’s done. As USDA questioned efforts by the Environmental Protection Agency to ease RFS requirements for fuel refiners, who largely oppose stringent renewable-fuel requirements, the corn-growers’ lobby privately sang Censky’s praises for going to bat on their behalf.
“Thank you for your advocacy for agriculture as USDA continues to work with President Trump, Administrator [Scott] Pruitt and members of Congress on biofuels policy,” the public-policy director for the National Corn Growers Association wrote to Censky in May 2018.
That note came a month after Censky emailed Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue the text of a NCGA statement hammering EPA’s decision to waive RFS requirements for a number of refiners. Censky included two paragraphs of commentary about the statement, all of which is redacted in the FOIA’d email. The email came just days before Perdue publicly criticized RFS waivers.
The vast majority of text in the Censky emails that PAY DIRT obtained is also redacted under a FOIA exemption that bars the release of communications deemed part of a “deliberative process” and therefore privileged. Censky appears to have taken steps to prevent the release of many of his emails under that exemption, frequently beginning his internal emails with a disclaimer proclaiming the messages “pre-decisional” or “deliberative.”
Those that are at least partially unredacted show a close relationship with agricultural interests on RFS issues, and significant involvement in developing USDA’s position on EPA waivers in particular. Censky, for instance, in August 2018 personally edited a document titled “RFS Deal Options,” which appears to be an internal product detailing USDA’s efforts to reach an agreement with EPA on the waiver issue.
When the ethanol industry got a sit-down with the White House, EPA, and USDA to hammer out their RFS differences, Censky was there to represent the latter. And he had an advance copy of the ethanol lobby’s presentation for the meeting.
“The ethanol industry is prepared to present the attached,” he wrote. Nearly all of the rest of the message is redacted.
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