Administrator Pruitt spends first year shrinking bureau’s reach, reducing regulations
WASHINGTON — Since 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency has been embroiled in an enforcement battle with a Michigan-based company accused of modifying the state's largest coal-fired power plant without getting federal permits for a projected rise in pollution.
On Dec. 7, as the Supreme Court was considering whether to hear the case, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt issued a memo that single-handedly reversed the agency's position. No longer would the EPA be "second guessing" DTE Energy's emission projections. Rather, it would accept the firm's "intent" to manage its pollution without requiring an enforceable agreement.
It's all part of President Donald Trump's broader push to reduce the "burden" on companies, Pruitt wrote.
The little-noticed episode offers a glimpse into how Pruitt has spent his first year running the EPA. In legal maneuvers and executive actions, in public speeches and closed-door meetings with industry groups, he has moved to shrink the agency's reach, alter its focus and pause or reverse numerous environmental rules. The effect has been to steer the EPA in the direction sought by those being regulated.
Along the way, Pruitt has begun to dismantle former President Barack Obama's environmental legacy to shift the nation away from its reliance on fossil fuels. Such aggressiveness on issues from coal waste to vehicle emissions has made Pruitt one of President Trump's most high-profile Cabinet members — not to mention one of the most controversial.
Critics describe Pruitt's tenure as an assault on the EPA's mission, its science and its employees.
"We've spent 40 years putting together an apparatus to protect public health and the environment from a lot of different pollutants," said William Ruckleshaus, the EPA's first administrator, who led the agency under both presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. "He's pulling that whole apparatus down."
Others, however, praise Pruitt for returning more power to individual states while scaling back what they see as the previous administration's regulatory excesses.
Pruitt said a priority during his first 10 months in office has been listening to "stakeholders that actually live under the regulations that we adopt ... I don't understand how that's
not what I should be doing.”
Pruitt, 49, stands on the opposite end of the political spectrum from his immediate predecessor, Gina McCarthy, but the two share something in common: a willingness to use the agency’s broad executive authority to act unilaterally.
“Vested in the administrator is this incredible power and this incredible regulatory reach,” said Ken Cook, president of the advocacy organization Environmental Working Group. “When there’s someone on the inside willing to unlock the door and let these special interests in, they can do tremendous damage to the environmental rule of law.”
From the moment he arrived at the agency in February, Pruitt began using his power to halt existing regulations and shift the bureaucracy.
“The administrator has been effective and very decisive on a number of issues [where] he can do things with the stroke of a pen,” said Jeffrey Holmstead, a former top EPA official under President George W. Bush and now a partner at the law and lobbying firm Bracewell. “He came in with a list of targets he needed to deal with, and he’s been very decisive on saying, ‘Here’s what we need to do.’”
Within days of taking office, Pruitt canceled the EPA’s request that nearly 20,000 oil and gas companies gauge their emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The following month, he withdrew a proposed ban on a commonly used pesticide that the EPA’s own scientists had argued poses risks to human health.
Despite his scant experience running environmental programs, Pruitt sued the Obama EPA 14 times when he was the Oklahoma attorney general and challenged the agency’s authority to regulate toxic mercury pollution, smog, carbon emissions from power plants and the quality of wetlands and other waters.
Pruitt says he has set about “revitalizing” the agency and focusing on areas, such as the Superfund cleanup program, that were “dormant” in past administrations. He seems confident that he will succeed in reshaping the EPA as he and Trump envision, despite environmental advocates vowing to battle him at every turn.
From his office complex on the third floor of the EPA’s headquarters, Pruitt operates in a cocoon of sorts.
He is accompanied 24/7 by a security detail, a setup that has tripled past staffing requirements. He has installed biometric locks on his office doors, as well as a $25,000 soundproof The EPA’s Scott Pruitt attended a briefing about hurricane damage in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in October. Seated next to him is Secretary of Energy Rick Perry. booth to make secure calls to the White House. And he has shied away from using email at the EPA, which would be subject to open-records laws, preferring instead to communicate by phone or in face-to-face meetings.
Pruitt has met with scores of industry executives, trade groups, farmers and ranchers, spoken to conservative political organizations and shuttled back and forth to the White House. But Pruitt’s calendars show limited contact with the EPA’s own staff. He has visited 30 states, by his count, but has yet to visit any of the EPA’s 10 regional offices.
Legal fights aside, Pruitt is making a more fundamental push to alter the EPA’s composition and mindset.
In the past, Pruitt said, “It was to put up fences. It was to keep fossil fuels in the ground, as an example.” By contrast, he sees his role as allowing the country to responsibly tap its natural resources.
To that end, Pruitt has moved aggressively to shrink the agency. More than 700 people have left, several hundred through buyouts this past summer. With them have gone decades of scientific expertise. The EPA now has about 14,400 staff, fewer than at any time since the final year of the Reagan administration.
Pruitt also has overhauled the EPA’s scientific-advisory boards, getting rid of numerous academic researchers in favor of experts from regulated industries and conservative states. The EPA’s leader argues that he is trying to make the agency more efficient. But what Pruitt describes as efficiency, Pruitt met with representatives of electric companies before rolling back Obama’s clean power-plant rule. his critics see as undermining the EPA’s ability to fulfill its mission.
This month, he and an entourage of aides traveled to Morocco at a price tag of roughly $40,000. Pruitt met with the country’s foreign minister, talked about solid waste and toured a solar-energy installation. But he also spent time touting the advantages of U.S. natural-gas exports.
It was an extraordinary occurrence: the leader of the EPA, in a foreign land, serving as one of the most outspoken salesmen for the nation’s fossil fuel industry.