Scott Pruitt Secretly Destroying the EPA
Doors are locked, staffers need permission to enter certain rooms, and sometimes phones aren’t allowed into the same room with EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt.
Scott Pruitt is trying to run the EPA under a cloak of secrecy, according to a new report from the New York Times.
Employees told the Times, “Mr. Pruitt often makes important phone calls from other offices rather than use the phone in his office.”
Pruitt is also accompanied by armed guards – the first head of the agency to ever request round-the-clock security.
Pruitt, the former Oklahoma attorney general who built his career suing the EPA, has made his mission clear – dismantle the agency’s policies and even portions of the institution.
He’s doing all of this in secret though – eliminating staff, closing offices, and rolling back important regulations that protect the environment.
“There’s a feeling of paranoia in the agency — employees feel like there’s been a hostile takeover and the guy in charge is treating them like enemies,” said Christopher Sellers, who conducted an interview survey with about 40 EPA employees.
An Example of How Pruitt Is Dismantling the EPA
Waters of the United States, a rule enacted by the Obama administration, was designed to take existing federal protections on large water bodies such as the Chesapeake Bay and Mississippi River and expand them to include the wetlands and small tributaries that flow into those larger waters.
It was fiercely opposed by farmers, rural landowners and real estate developers, because of economic costs. However, the economic benefits of preventing water pollution greatly outweighed those costs.
In mid-June, as Pruitt prepared a proposal to reverse the rule.
Jeffrey Ruchs, the executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, an organization representing government employees in environmental fields, said the EPA could not allow changes like this to take place, or expect its employees to follow such directives.
“This is a huge change, and they made it over a few days, with almost no record, no documentation,” Mr. Ruchs said, adding, “It wasn’t so much cooking the books, it was throwing out the books.”
This is not good. Especially because Pruitt is able to do all this quietly, while hiding behind Trump’s bombastic tweets
