CLEAN-WATER DEBATE HELD IN SECRET
EPA chief Scott Pruitt said he wanted to hear from Americans about how to rewrite the Clean Water Act, but the public was barred from his meetings.
WASHINGTON» As Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt jetted around the country last year, regularly flying first or business class at hefty taxpayer expense, his stated mission was often a noble one: to hear from Americans about how Washington could most effectively and fairly enforce the Clean Water Act.
Yet when Pruitt showed up in North Dakota in August to seek guidance on how to rewrite a landmark Obama-era water protection rule, it was clear there were some voices he did not care to hear.
The general public was barred from participating in the roundtable Pruitt presided over at the University of North Dakota. An EPA official even threatened to call security on reporters who tried to linger.
What happened at the meeting is still a mystery to all but the invitees, a list dominated by industry and Pruitt’s political allies. The same is true of many of the other 16 such roundtables Pruitt held as he developed his plan to weaken a federal rule that protects the drinking water of 117 million Americans.
Such behind-closed-doors deliberation is a hallmark of the agency under Pruitt, an EPA administrator who spent $25,000 to set up a secure phone booth in his office and said security concerns guided his luxury plane travel. Pruitt’s security detail said flying in coach exposed him to too much interaction with hostile members of the public. Under fire for the costly plane tickets, Pruitt said he would start trying to fly coach.
But the buffer Pruitt has created from critical elements of the public extends beyond his choice of airline seating. It also defines decision-making at his agency.
Pruitt purged scientists from an independent EPA advisory board that, among other things, rigorously reviewed the science behind the Obama water rule and found it to be sound. An EPA regulatory reform task force advising Pruitt on the rollback of clean water and air rules operates largely in the shadows. Pruitt’s advisers ordered economic data that reflected the benefits of Obama’s water rule erased from a key federal report, over the objections of career staffers at the EPA.
Pruitt denied he is bending the rules. The effort is aimed at removing federal Clean Water Act protection from millions of miles of streams and wetlands, including more than 80 percent of the waters in California and the arid West. The administration last month suspended for two years the new guidelines protecting those waters as it scrambles to draft a replacement rule that substantially narrows the reach of the act.
Pruitt is, indeed, making a robust effort to connect with stakeholders — spending a lot of public dollars along the way. But his audiences are typically handpicked and almost always industry-friendly.
While EPA officials say others have ample opportunity to be heard through proforma comment filings, webinars and occasional meetings with staff members, many communities feel shut out.
“No outreach at all was done here,” the Navajo Nation protested in a letter to the EPA weeks before it suspended the clean water rule. The letter contrasted the hasty suspension of the rule with the four years of tribal consultation and scientific review that went into creating it.
There were no such complaints from the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, which not only hosted Pruitt on a Colorado ranch but also persuaded him to star in its advocacy video filmed there. The video urges ranchers to lobby the EPA to weaken the rule. Earlier on the day of the ranch visit, a commercial flight delay moved Pruitt to spend $5,700 of public money on a shorthop charter so he and staff members could stay on schedule.
In the video, Pruitt accused the Obama administration of “reimagining” its authority to define waters deserving federal protection to include even puddles — which the previous administration said it had specifically excluded from protection. The attorneys general of nine states cited the video as evidence that Pruitt, who had sued to scrap the Obama water rule while attorney general of Oklahoma, is not approaching the rewrite with an open mind.