Pruitt goes, but don’t expect big changes at EPA
The only surprising things about the resignation of embattled Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt were that it took as long as it did and that he wasn’t unceremoniously fired months earlier.
As an astounding number of scandals swirled around the EPA chief, the clamor for his departure came to resemble nothing more than the 1972 Dr. Seuss classic about a man named Marvin K. Mooney, with Pruitt substituting for the title character:
“The time has come. The time is now. Just go. Go GO! I don’t care how. You can go by foot. You can go by cow. Edward Scott Pruitt, will you please go now!”
So Pruitt is finally and belatedly gone, after spawning more than a dozen ethics investigations in fewer than 17 months on the job.
These cover a sweetheart rental agreement with an energy lobbyist’s wife, lavish spending of taxpayer money on security and first-class airfare, efforts to get his wife a Chick-fil-A franchise, using aides to do his private business, and other allegations too numerous to mention here.
How did Pruitt survive as long as he did? The short answer was the fealty he displayed toward President Donald Trump and the passion he displayed for doing the president’s bidding in rolling back environmental regulations.
For all of Trump’s rhetoric about “draining the swamp” in Washington, he was reluctant to get rid of the biggest grifter in his own administration because, as the president put it Thursday, in his opinion Pruitt was doing “an outstanding job” within the agency.
In reality, the former Oklahoma attorney general leaves a disastrous policy legacy on top of his disastrous personal one. Most consequentially, Pruitt, who questions the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is driving global warming, pushed Trump to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord.
That ill-considered decision leaves America as the odd country out among the world’s nations, even as parts of the planet experience extreme, recordshattering heat and rising sea levels.
Pruitt’s top deputy, Andrew Wheeler, is set to become acting administrator today. Wheeler, a former Senate aide, EPA staffer and energy lobbyist, is expected to continue implementing Pruitt’s deregulatory agenda. In other words, the new boss is the same as the old boss, but with less baggage and a sense of entitlement.
Like Cal Ripken’s streak of 2,632 consecutive baseball games, Pruitt’s record for ethical entanglements by a single Cabinet member is going to be hard to top. It was, indeed, long past time for him to go. So … he went.