From Huffington Post earlier today:

Kathleen Hartnett-White, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Council on Environmental Quality, was just one Senate vote away from becoming the White House’s top environmental adviser.

But late Thursday night, the controversial former Texas regulator returned to square one.

The Senate sent her nomination back to the White House as part of a deal to close out the legislative session before the holidays.

Democrats have raised a number of objections to Hartnett-White's nomination.

For starters

According to the The Hill:

She’s compared environmental activism to “paganism,” called renewable energy “parasitic” and said carbon dioxide levels have not gone up “drastically” in recent years.

She misrepresented data that may have increased cancer risk

In committee hearings:

The Senate committee honed in on a 2004 document that showed White openly supported a TCEQ policy of subtracting the margin of error from tests for radiation contamination in water. If a public water supply was found to have amounts of naturally occurring radium or uranium that exceeded federal limits, Texas regulators would subtract the margin of error and lower the results. Under White’s leadership, the agency presented testimony that said, “Maintaining this calculation procedure will eliminate approximately 35 violations.”

Radiation science experts say Hartnett-White’s actions probably allowed drinking water with increased cancer risk to remain untreated.

She plagiarized her answers on the Senate's questionnaire

For example:

In a joint letter addressed to Kathleen Hartnett-White, 10 Senators asked the nominee to explain at least 18 instances where they said her statements included language that “appeared verbatim” to that given to the committee by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and EPA Assistant Administrator for Air and Radiation, Bill Wehrum.

“We are troubled that it appears that you have cut and pasted from the written answers of other nominees in your responses to questions that were submitted to you,” the letter said.

She believes that fossil fuels ended slavery

As the Huffington Post documents:

(I)n 2014, she made the particularly specious claim that fossil fuels are to thank for abolishing slavery. In a blog post criticizing an article in The Nation by MSNBC host Chris Hayes, Hartnett-White made the connection between “the abolition of slavery and humanity’s first widespread use of energy from fossil fuels.”

“Fossil fuels dissolved the economic justification for slavery,” she wrote. “When the concentrated and versatile energy stored in fossil fuels was converted to mechanical energy, the economic limits under which all societies had formerly existed were blown apart.”

One critic pointed out that the coal-fired industrial revolution actually “exacerbated the problem of slavery,” in part because the hunger for raw materials in English factories and mills funded plantations in the American South and the subjugation of colonized peoples around the world. . . .

“White gets it exactly backwards,” Christopher Hooks wrote in the Texas Observer in 2014. “The fossil-fueled industrial revolution . . . made slavery more lucrative. It made slavery worse.”

Hartnett-White will need to start over. And even though all Republican committee members voted for her earlier this year, she may continue to face opposition when her nomination gets to the Senate floor. However, I don't think she need worry about a job if she's eventually not confirmed by the Senate -- with her qualifications, views, and experience, I would think that she's certainly qualified to write op-eds for conservative newspapers.