Politically appointed U.S. environmental officials last year overruled concerns of career scientists about air pollution in a Wisconsin county where U.S. President Donald Trump has pushed for a factory to be built by Foxconn Technology Co., newly released internal emails show. Trump has been a supporter of the Taiwanese technology giant Foxconn building a flat screen factory in Racine County, Wisconsin, a project the company said could create up to 13,000 jobs. He announced the project at a ceremony in 2017 and has claimed it is proof of his ability to revive U.S. manufacturing. Former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, helped secure about $4 billion in tax breaks for the project.
But Racine County has suffered some of the state's worst cases of smog, also known as ozone, pollution that causes premature deaths from lung and heart complications.
The emails obtained by the Sierra Club and Clean Wisconsin under a freedom of information request show Trump administration officials, including then-administrator Scott Pruitt, overruled career EPA scientists to exempt Racine County from a list of counties that break smog standards. That has freed Foxconn from having to make millions of dollars in pollution control devices, if the project is eventually built.