Administrator aims to reshape EPA culture
Pruitt opens advisory boards to industry voices
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 is doing away with the “sueand-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 regulations.
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.
He said the red team/blue team approach is integral to the rigorous selfanalysis 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. “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 facts of climate science, said former New Jersey GOP governor Christine Todd Whitman, who headed the EPA under President 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.
“I believe in bringing people together in an open process to encourage peer review. That’s what science is.” Scott Pruitt