Critics fault the secrecy that the EPA administrator employs in running the agency.
Its leader calls himself advocate against agency’s ‘activist agenda’
WASHINGTON — When career employees of the Environmental Protection Agency are summoned to a meeting with the agency’s administrator, Scott Pruitt, at agency headquarters, they no longer can count on easy access to the floor where his office is, according to interviews with employees of the federal agency.
Doors to the floor are now frequently locked, and employees have to have an escort to gain entrance. Some employees say they are told to leave behind their cellphones when they meet with Pruitt and are sometimes told not to take notes.
Pruitt, according to the employees, who requested anonymity out of fear of losing their jobs, often makes important phone calls from other offices rather than use the phone in his office, and he is accompanied, even at EPA headquarters, by armed guards, the first head of the agency to ever request round-the-clock security.
A former Oklahoma attorney general who built his career suing the EPA, and whose LinkedIn profile still describes him as “a leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda,” Pruitt has made it clear that he sees his mission to be dismantling the agency’s policies — and even portions of the institution itself.
But as he works to roll back regulations, close offices and eliminate staff at the agency charged with protecting the nation’s environment and public health, Pruitt is taking extraordinary measures to conceal his actions, according to interviews with more than 20 current and former agency employees.
Career scientists
Together with a small group of political appointees, many with backgrounds, like his, in Oklahoma politics, and with advice from industry lobbyists, Pruitt has taken aim at an agency whose policies have been developed and enforced by thousands of the EPA’s career scientists and policy experts, many of whom work in the same building.
“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, an expert in environmental history at Stony Brook University, who this spring conducted an interview survey with about 40 EPA employees.
Such tensions are not unusual in federal agencies when an election leads to a change in the party in control of the White House. But they seem particularly bitter at the EPA.
Allies of Pruitt say he is justified in his measures to ramp up his secrecy and physical protection, given that his agenda and politics clash so fiercely with those of so many of the 15,000 employees at the agency he heads.
‘Stocked with leftists’
“EPA is legendary for being stocked with leftists,” said Steve Milloy, a member of President Donald Trump’s EPA transition team and author of the book “Scare Pollution: How and Why to Fix the EPA.” “If you work in a hostile environment, you’re not the one that’s paranoid.”
Pruitt’s penchant for secrecy is reflected not just in his inaccessibility and concern for security. He has terminated a long practice of publicly posting his appointments calendar and that of all the top agency aides, and he has evaded oversight questions from lawmakers, according to the Democratic senators who posed the questions. His aides recently asked career employees to make major changes in a rule regulating water quality in the United States — without any records of the changes they were being ordered to make.
William Ruckelshaus, who served as EPA administrator under two Republican presidents and once wrote a memo directing agency employees to operate “in a fishbowl,” said such secrecy is antithetical to the mission of the agency.
“Reforming the regulatory system would be a good thing if there were an honest, open process,” he said. “But it appears that what is happening now is taking a meat ax to the protections of public health and environment and then hiding it.”
Ruckelshaus said such secrecy could pave the way toward, or exacerbate, another disaster like the contamination of public drinking water in Flint, Mich., or the 2014 chemical spill into the public water supply in Charleston, W.Va. — while leading to a dearth of information when such incidents happen.
“Something will happen, like Flint, and the public will realize they can’t get any information about what happened or why,” he said.
But Liz Bowman, a spokeswoman for the EPA, categorically denied the accounts employees interviewed for this article gave of the secrecy surrounding Pruitt.
“None of this is true,” she said. “It’s all rumors.”
She added, in an emailed statement, “It’s very disappointing, yet not surprising, to learn that you would solicit leaks, and collude with union officials in an effort to distract from the work we are doing to implement the president’s agenda.”