Pruitt’s resignation shows we can resist an authoritarian agenda
When hundreds of Environmental Protection Agency scientists, engineers and attorneys got up from their desks and walked out of work and into Federal Plaza in protest back in February 2017, none knew how Scott Pruitt would ultimately be mired in ethical scandal after scandal, disgraced and forced from his job as EPA administrator. What was clear then was that the EPA’s very existence was under threat under the Trump administration, and that if the folks who worked there protecting the air we breathe and water we drink didn’t get organized and start fighting back, millions of lives could be at risk.
As any EPA employee will tell you, not one of them got into that line of work to be a member of The Resistance. They are career scientists, working in laboratories or cubicles analyzing data. They never thought they’d ever talk to a reporter, let alone stand up and speak out at a rally with their union, the American Federation of Government Employees. But on that February day, and on so many days since, they’ve found themselves at the forefront of a fight for the lives of the people they were tasked with protecting.
There’s a bold line from the rally that day to Scott Pruitt’s resignation earlier this month. The #BootPruitt resistance campaign offers an example of how we can beat back the broad agenda of an increasingly authoritarian federal government in a time that so often feels hopeless and demoralizing.
Pruitt was forced to resign because of a confluence of intense negative pressure generated by thousands of grass-roots organizers and activists, paired with humiliating media coverage of his habitual ethical lapses. The resistance organizing campaign was led in large part by EPA scientists turned activists, in partnership with people living in communities on the front lines of environmental crises, from Flint, Michigan, to East Chicago, Indiana, and with environmental organizations small and large all across the country.
The Sierra Club papered the EPA with Freedom of Information Act requests that helped expose more than 60,000 pages of documents from Pruitt’s EPA that helped illustrate that Pruitt was working solely for himself and for corporate polluters. Smaller, community-based organizations in East Chicago tracked Pruitt when he surreptitiously came to Indiana earlier this year, pointing reporters to where he was hiding away from West Calumet residents who were demanding resources and certainty on adequate and thorough clean-up of their homes, and lifelong health care for the exposure to contamination they’ve endured.
The #BootPruitt movement was bolstered by a handful of relentless, intrepid investigative reporters, some at major journalistic institutions and others at smaller but nonetheless unyielding outlets.
Let’s have no illusions — the victory of Scott Pruitt’s departure doesn’t mean the EPA is back on track. Andrew Wheeler, the next EPA administrator, is a career coalindustry lobbyist and climate change denier who is already racking up scandals of his own. We must be — and we are — ready to continue to fight. But we have now seen that we can win. There is now a clear and powerful example for us to follow. The only path to winning the future we deserve is when we unite, pushing in the same direction at once, through an intersectional, creative, demographically and tactically diverse, and most of all, unrelenting, effort. In concert with a well-resourced, principled, unintimidated press, we can — and must — prevail.