[ad_1]
Scott The resignation of Pruitt at the head of the Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday reassured – as we could use it now – that some accountability forces are still in force in Donald Trump's Washington.
True, it took months of revelations about Pruitt's ethical blunders to repel him – the first-class taxpayer-driven trip, the $ 43,000 secure payphone and the unprecedented security detail of twenty-four hours that he demanded, the agenda dominated by the meeting after the meeting with fossil fuel interests, the bizarre tasks given to his staff, such as driving him to secure his moisturizer Ritz- Carlton preferred. And it's not that Trump himself held Pruitt to be responsible, or that Pruitt admitted to committing a wrongdoing while he was abandoning his job. Trump tweeted Thursday, "Within the agency, Scott has done a remarkable job, and I will always be grateful for it." Pruitt's letter of resignation – a particular document, which cites his belief that "the providence of God" and repeatedly invokes the "blessing" of serving in his administration – offers no excuse for his actions either. Pruitt decided to resign, he says, because "the incessant attacks against me personally, my family, are unprecedented and have all cost us a heavy price."
Journalists and environmentalists who diligently reported and watched the EPA face growing hostility (an EPA spokesman recently called a reporter looking into the resignation of a senior Pruitt assistant, "a garbage can") and Government Accountability bureaucrats Office who were investigating Pruitt. Without these guard dogs, we would know very little about Pruitt's misdeeds, and he would always enjoy the blessing of working for Trump. Elizabeth Southerland, a former superior of E.P.A. official,. who resigned in July after thirty years at the agency, told me in an email on Thursday afternoon that she had already "heard from many current and former EPA scientists who are all deeply relieved that the most corrupt administrator we have ever known has finally left "
Yet, the fact remains that the worst aspect of Pruitt's tenure was not the ethical declines – some unsettled , some blatant – who finally put him in trouble.The worst was Pruitt's policy: his doubt about climate science; his support for Trump's withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement; and its continuation of the dismantling of important regulations, including auto-emission standards and federal bans on the dumping of highly toxic coal ash alongside water courses. "Pruitt's personal behavior as a that leader shook much more actions s consequent, such as the reduction of criminal actions against polluters; A survey released last month by the nonprofit group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility showed that they have fallen to their lowest level in thirty years.
If Pruitt was a little too complacent in Washington (even curator Laura Ingraham, the chosen group of less than fifty people Trump follows on Twitter, tweeted earlier this week, "Pruitt is the swamp, drain it" ), it was a pity, because otherwise, as Trump 's praise words indicate, he was doing Andrew Wheeler, Pruitt' s former deputy, who will become interim administrator of the company. EPA, is a former coal industry lobbyist who represented the Trump tycoon and Trump ally, Robert Murray, against environmental regulations of the Obama era. He was also a contributor to Senator James Inhofe, of Oklahoma, a man who threw a snowball on the Senate floor to show that the land could not warm up.
Last year, as a lobbyist firm FaegreBD Consulting, Wheeler was part of what Washington Post called "a concerted lobbying campaign" on behalf of a company called Energy Fuels Resources, which was looking to reduce the size of the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, because it was looking for easier access to the region's uranium deposits. In December, Trump announced that he was reducing the ears of Bears Ears by eighty-five percent.
Pruitt came to E.P.A. As Washington's anti-government alien, who had made his whole career in Oklahoma politics, Wheeler began his career with the EPA in the early 1990s, and he remained in Washington since. He probably knows better the inner workings of the agency than Pruitt and may be more adept at deregulation. (Several of Pruitt's attempts to overthrow the rules have been tried in court.)
Lisa Evans, Environmental Law Organization Lawyer Earthjustice, said in an e-mail that she was "delighted to see Pruitt go away". but that "no one should be deceived that the ship has been straightened." In short, Pruitt was held responsible. But the job of the guard dogs is not over.
Source link
