The mandate of the head of the Environmental Protection Agency is to protect human health and enforce environmental regulations.
Yet when he reflected on his first year in office in a recent report, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt celebrated the rollback of 22 regulations under his watch, and cheered President Donald Trump’s rejection of climate science and policy.
Despite his cries of “drain the swamp,” President Trump has stocked Washington DC full with the kinds of out-of-touch elites that he so routinely rails against. Among them, Scott Pruitt—recently named “Trump’s Worst Cabinet Member”—shines especially bright for his apparent sense of entitlement, his preference for first class air travel, and reverence for private industry groups that comes even at the expense of life-saving environmental protections.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is giving top officials permission to moonlight for private companies in their off-time, a practice that could conflict with their official duties at the federal agency.
Two of the most prominent EPA officials currently under scrutiny are John Konkus, who serves as the EPA’s deputy associate administrator for the Office of Public Affairs, and Patrick Davis, an EPA senior adviser.
Scott Pruitt, who has come under criticism in recent weeks for his first-class airfare, traveled first class on a few occasions as Oklahoma’s attorney general, according to documents obtained by The Oklahoman.
Thousands of pages of travel logs, emails and expense reports obtained Tuesday in an open records request show the Republican attorney general took about 80 trips between 2012 and when he left office last February. On four occasions, those trips involved first-class flights, the records show.
President Donald Trump nominated a top official with Dow Chemical Co. to head the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) unit that oversees chemical spills from Superfund sites. Dow Chemical is linked to more than a hundred of these 1,340 toxic clean-up sites across the nation.
The mission of the Environmental Protection Agency is “to protect human health and the environment.” Disgraced EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt tried his best to undermine this vital mission by choosing to slash critical health protections and let corporate polluters off the hook. Now that Pruitt’s been booted, we need an EPA administrator dedicated to undoing his toxic agenda and restoring the agency to its core mission. Progress is possible and necessary – but another corporate crony or climate skeptic will not get us there.
Scott Pruitt is gone, but the fight is just beginning. We need an EPA administrator who puts our health and environment first, period. Any alternative is unacceptable.
