USA TODAY International Edition
Pruitt aims to change culture of EPA
A year in, administrator says he’s ‘back to basics’
WASHINGTON – EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt isn’t just dismantling the Clean Power Plan and other high-profile environmental programs of the Obama era. He’s on a mission to re-engineer the agency’s culture by returning power to states and away from the Washington bureaucrats and coastal elites he said have led it astray.
The EPA, for example, is doing away with the “sue-and-settle” approach that Pruitt said improperly allowed the Obama administration to circumvent laws by rewriting regulations behind closed doors with friendly environmental groups who filed lawsuits.
The agency has rewritten membership rules for the agency’s advisory boards, so industry advocates and academics from Midwestern and Mountain states — which Pruitt said were underrepresented — have greater influence when counseling leaders on new rules.
And he’s adopted a “red team/blue team” model designed to challenge climate change assumptions that global warming is occurring and humans are the primary cause — a view endorsed by the majority of scientists and by a report the White House issued this month.
Pruitt, who challenged the Clean Power Plan as Oklahoma attorney general, said he’s plowing ahead with the rollback of the rule designed to curb carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants despite the report’s conclusions.
And he said the red team/blue team approach is integral to the rigorous selfanalysis he believes the EPA has been lacking in recent years.
“I’m an attorney. I believe in bringing people together in an open process to encourage peer review, that’s what science is,” Pruitt said during a recent interview. “We shouldn’t run from that ... That’s something we ought to embrace as a culture and I think as an agency.”
Of all Pruitt’s moves to reshape an agency whose authority he frequently challenged in court, the red team/blue team strategy has raised some of the loudest alarm bells among his critics who consider it an attack on science.
The exercise was designed at the height of the Cold War to assess Soviet reactions to various scenarios. And that’s where it belongs — not to relitigate the proven facts of climate science, said former New Jersey GOP governor Christine Todd Whitman, who headed the EPA under George W. Bush.
“That Mr. Pruitt seeks to use the power of the EPA to elevate those who have already lost the argument is shameful, and the only outcome will be that the public will know less about the science of climate change than before,” she wrote in The New York Times.
Ken Cuccinelli, a Pruitt ally and former Republican attorney general from Virginia, said the EPA administrator rightly believes the agency needs to return to its roots and abandon quixotic pursuits Obama conducted on global warming embodied by the Clean Power Plan and the decision to sign on to the treaty known as the Paris Accord.
“The previous administration weaponized this agency,” Cuccinelli said. “Scott believes in clean water and clean air . ... But all of the other creative stuff is the kind of stuff that political elites want to spend their time on and if it affects Americans all it does is reduce their opportunities.”
Pruitt had sued the agency 14 times on behalf of Oklahoma challenging a variety of regulations and billing himself as “a leading activist against EPA’s activist agenda.” A month after he took the helm in February, the budget released by President Trump, an ardent EPA critic, proposed gutting the $8.2 billion agency by nearly a third.
In turn, Pruitt was opposed loudly by hundreds of former EPA employees, and more quietly by some current ones. They feared he would assist the petrochemical industry while ignoring the science that served as the foundation of many public health protections.
Subsequent cuts in pollution enforcement and the departure of hundreds of veteran EPA staffers through a buyout program have given environmental groups more reason to worry.
Nearly a year into his tenure, Pruitt still feels the resistance from employees who have yet to buy into his message that the EPA ought to work more with business to find solutions.
“The most challenging thing that we encounter (at EPA) is this thinking, this attitude that we as a country have to choose between growth and jobs and being good stewards of our environment,” he told the conservative Federalist Society National Lawyers Convention. “We can do both. But the past few years, we’ve been told it’s prohibition . ... And frankly I don’t think that’s consistent with the law.”
His critics say that’s code for giving the energy industry and other polluters carte blanche to maximize profit with little regard for environmental damage.
As part of his effort to change the culture at EPA, Pruitt is touting a “back-tobasics “agenda that emphasizes partnerships with states and issues he calls central to the agency’s mission when Congress created it in 1970.
He’s prioritizing cleanup of toxic Superfund sites, lead-tainted drinking water systems, and abandoned mines.
“We have to act based on the authority given to us by Congress. When this agency and other agencies in the past have gone askew is when they’ve created and filled in the vacuum. That’s what they did with the Clean Power Plan ... We’re correcting that.”
“I believe in bringing people together in an open process to encourage peer review, that’s what science is.” Scott Pruitt