Scandal-plagued EPA head Pruitt resigns
Resignation comes after months of allegations over ethical violations
WASHINGTON— Scott Pruitt, U.S. President Donald Trump’s administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, resigned after facing months of allegations over legal and ethical violations.
Trump announced the resignation in a tweet on Thursday in which he thanked Pruitt for an “outstanding job” and said the agency’s deputy, Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist, would take over as the acting administrator on Monday. In his resignation letter, Pruitt cited “unrelenting attacks on me personally” as one of the reasons for his departure, an apparent reference to the numerous investigations into his stewardship of the agency.
Pruitt had been hailed as a hero among conservatives for his zealous deregulation, but he could not overcome a spate of ethics questions about his alleged spending abuses, firstclass travel and cozy relationships with lobbyists. Earlier on Thursday, the New York Times reported on new questions about whether aides to Pruitt had deleted sensitive information about his meetings from his public schedule, potentially in violation of the law.
Pruitt also came under fire for enlisting aides to obtain special favours for him and his family, such as reaching out to the chief executive of Chick-fil-A, Dan Cathy, with the intent of helping Pruitt’s wife, Marlyn, open a franchise of the restaurant.
Pruitt, a former Oklahoma attorney general who built his career on lawsuits against the agency he would eventually lead, remained a favourite of Trump’s for the majority of his tenure at the EPA. He began the largest regulatory rollback in the agency’s history, undoing, delaying or blocking several Obama-era environmental rules. Among them was a suite of historic regulations aimed at mitigating global-warming pollution from the United States’ vehicles and power plants.
Pruitt also played a lead role in urging Trump to follow through on his campaign pledge to withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris climate agreement, despite warnings from some of the president’s other senior advisers that the move could damage the United States’ credibility in foreign policy.
Under the landmark accord, nearly every country has committed to reducing emissions of planet-warming fossil fuel pollution.
It is expected that the EPA’s deputy administrator, Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist who shares Pruitt’s zeal to dismantle climate change regulations, will act as the agency’s leader until a new administrator is nominated by Trump and confirmed by the Senate.
In 2017, Pruitt made headlines for questioning the established science of human-caused climate change, contradicting decades of research by scientific institutions, including his own agency.
Although Pruitt was harshly criticized for the remarks, they did not affect his good standing with a president who has also mocked climate science.