Watchdog says Pruitt’s spending unjustified
WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency failed to document any threats or security risks that warranted spending more than $3.5 million on unprecedented aroundthebodyguards for thenchief Scott Pruitt, the agency’s internal watchdog concluded Tuesday.
The EPA allowed Pruitt and his administrative team to increase the security detail to 19 agents, up from six for Pruitt’s predecessor. That “undocumented decision represents an inefficient use of agency resources,” the inspector general concluded.
EPA spokesman Michael Abboud, in defending the spending, said in an email that officials had to look at more than specific and serious threats, or the lack of them, in deciding how much security an official needs.
Abboud cited gun attacks without warning on GOP lawmakers at a baseball practice last year and on a Democratic congresswoman in Arizona in 2011.
“Lack of a threat does not mean that there is no risk or that protective services are not appropriate,” the EPA spokesman wrote.
Pruitt left the EPA in July after less than 1 years and amid unending allegations of scandals over his spending and abuses of office. The new acting EPA administrator, Andrew Wheeler, ended the unprecedented full-time security detail that month.
The inspector general’s report said Pruitt’s security costs were more than double those of his predecessor, Gina McCarthy, during her last year.
Travel costs for Pruitt’s bodyguards more than tripled, to $739,580, from February 2017 to December 2017, owing to Pruitt’s insistence on 24-hour-a-day security and on premiumclass travel for himself and a bodyguard, the report said. Pruitt