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40 points by ryen 7 years ago

fzeroracer 7 years ago |

I can only hope that he's properly investigated for the sheer amount of overt corruption and waste he's been personally responsible for.

mikestew 7 years ago |

Many in the Trump administration strike me as simply incompetent in their roles. Pruitt, OTOH, almost seemed to be going out of his way to see what he could get away with. "How much self-dealing, graft, and over-spending can I do before they can my ass? Hold my beer..." I'm surprised it has taken this long, but perhaps his antics were a useful distraction from other issues.

And that's ignoring the fact that he seemed to fail at the main tenets of his job.

js2 7 years ago | |

Next up: Ryan Zinke.

ci5er 7 years ago | |

> And that's ignoring the fact that he seemed to fail at the main tenets of his job.

Really? How?

The personal habits were egregious, but as to his administrative choices, do you simply disagree with his policy choices? Or did he do something wrong?

EDIT: The reason his corruption made me sad is that I thought he was succeeding at the basic tenets of his job. Which means that you and I might well differ at what those tenets might be. I'm curious: what do you think the head of the EPA should be doing (within the bounds of the job) that he was not doing?

hn_throwaway_99 7 years ago | | |

I get that Democrats and Republicans have very, very different views on the role of government, and especially the EPA.

Still, Scott Pruitt seemed almost cartoonishly evil in this role. I can understand if you believe the environment is better protected by some other means, but when your primary goal is to basically continue acting as a coal industry lobbyist, methinks head of the EPA is not a job you should have.

mikestew 7 years ago | | |

Pruitt has rolled back or delayed the implementation of many regulations that I think would be effective in protecting the environment. Civil penalties against polluters are half of what they were before Pruitt showed up. I could go on, but suffice it to say that as director of the Environmental Protection Agency, I don't think Pruitt was doin' a whole lot of protectin'. If you feel that the environment (no, not the "business environment") is better protected thanks to the actions of Scott Pruitt, then we're just going to have to agree to disagree.

virtuabhi 7 years ago | | |

https://www.apnews.com/646836ad590c4230b730fc17cfbcb967/EPA-...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/22/climate/epa-scientists.ht...

https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/editorials/2018/06/22/epa...

http://www.newsweek.com/pruitt-trump-asbestos-chemicals-trum...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2018/04/24/epa-chief...

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-verchick-epa-cost...

I am surprised that you were not able to search for this information yourself. I sense either incompetence or trollish behavior.

danso 7 years ago | | |

It seems his resignation was directly related to his "administrative choices". It wasn't coincidence that his resignation came minutes after a NYT story alleged that he ordered the deletion of records that are mandated for preservation by federal law:

https://nytimes.com/2018/07/05/climate/pruitt-epa-calendar-m...

shakestheclown 7 years ago | | |

Talking admin and not policy, he had a number of issues. The secret calendars may have violated federal law, the large raises for his aides that the White House declined and he went around them and did anyway, the large increase in security detail costs and first class flights, the soundproof booth, having staffers book his hotels on their personal cards with no reimbursement, using staff to find his wife a job, making staff run personal errands, etc.

For a guy that supposedly believes in smaller government he seemed to waste a pretty fair amount of agency money.

elipsey 7 years ago | | |

Pruitt is accused of declining to exercise the mandate of EPA in various ways, and discarding results and recommendations from staff scientists. In context, he was appointed to administer EPA by an executive that is issuing orders to modify science based recommendations by fiat. A cursory search in this area returns a variety of examples.

--canceled tracking requirements for fossil-fuel related methane emissions[1]

--overruled the internal recommendation to ban chlorpyrifos[2]

--sought to delay various reports and standards[3][4]

–proposed “transparency” rules to disallow the use of anonymized human health data[5]

--worked to remove climate assumptions from agency recommendations, e.g. for flood risk[6]

--ordering downward revision of environmental cost assumptions[7]

[1] https://insideclimatenews.org/news/03032017/scott-pruitt-env...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/us/politics/epa-insectici...

[3] https://www.politico.com/story/2018/05/14/emails-white-house...

[4] https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/8-1-17_state_of_ny_v_u...

[5] https://s3.amazonaws.com/ucs-documents/science-and-democracy...

[6] https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/0...

[7] https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-the-trump-administration-...