U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for U.S. Attorney General, introduced the first so-called “Halliburton Loophole” bill back in 1999 before it was ever known as such.
Sessions co-sponsored the bill (S.724) with the climate change-denying Senator James Inhofe (R-OK). The bill called for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to exempt enforcement of the Safe Drinking Water Act as it relates to hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”).
The bill’s language eventually became a provision in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, known today as the “Halliburton Loophole” because the company’s ex-CEO and then-Vice President Dick Cheney headed up the industry-loaded Energy Policy Task Force which helped pen the bill’s language.
S.724 was introduced in 1999, in the middle of the years-long Legal Environmental Assistance Foundation (LEAF) v. EPAlegal battle, which was heard in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit.