The EPA under the rule of Scott Pruitt:
When career employees of the Environmental Protection Agency are summoned to a meeting with the agency’s administrator, Scott Pruitt, at agency headquarters, they no longer can count on easy access to the floor where his office is, according to interviews with employees of the federal agency.
Doors to the floor are now frequently locked, and employees have to have an escort to gain entrance.
Some employees say they are also told to leave behind their cellphones when they meet with Mr. Pruitt, and are sometimes told not to take notes.
Mr. Pruitt, according to the employees, who requested anonymity out of fear of losing their jobs, often makes important phone calls from other offices rather than use the phone in his office, and he is accompanied, even at E.P.A. headquarters, by armed guards, the first head of the agency to ever request round-the-clock security.
Hmmm what does that remind me of…oh yes an armed coup. Apparently Pruitt has imposed martial law on the agency that is tasked with protecting the environment that we all depend on – including Trump and his Trumplets and Scott Pruitt and all. Why has he done that? I suppose because his entire purpose is to destroy the agency, and he wants to quell resistance by means of intimidation.
He’s also resorting to secrecy.
[A]s he works to roll back regulations, close offices and eliminate staff at the agency charged with protecting the nation’s environment and public health, Mr. Pruitt is taking extraordinary measures to conceal his actions, according to interviews with more than 20 current and former agency employees.
…
Allies of Mr. Pruitt say he is justified in his measures to ramp up his secrecy and physical protection, given that his agenda and politics clash so fiercely with those of so many of the 15,000 employees at the agency he heads.
Well that depends on first assuming that Pruitt is justified in destroying the agency he was appointed to direct. I don’t think he is justified in doing that, at least not morally.
It’s like putting a known crime boss in charge of the FBI, or an anti-vaxxer in charge of the NIH, or a flourishing tax cheat in charge of the IRS.
Mr. Pruitt’s penchant for secrecy is reflected not just in his inaccessibility and concern for security. He has terminated a decades-long practice of publicly posting his appointments calendar and that of all the top agency aides, and he has evaded oversight questions from lawmakers on Capitol Hill, according to the Democratic senators who posed the questions.
None of this should be allowed. I hope journalists are making FOIA requests by the ton.
His aides recently asked career employees to make major changes in a rule regulating water quality in the United States — without any records of the changes they were being ordered to make. And the E.P.A. under Mr. Pruitt has moved to curb certain public information, shutting down data collection of emissions from oil and gas companies, and taking down more than 1,900 agency webpages on topics like climate change, according to a tally by the Environmental Defense Fund, which did a Freedom of Information request on these terminated pages.
William D. Ruckelshaus, who served as E.P.A. director under two Republican presidents and once wrote a memo directing agency employees to operate “in a fishbowl,” said such secrecy is antithetical to the mission of the agency.
“Reforming the regulatory system would be a good thing if there were an honest, open process,” he said. “But it appears that what is happening now is taking a meat ax to the protections of public health and environment and then hiding it.”
Mr. Ruckelshaus said such secrecy could pave the way toward, or exacerbate, another disaster like the contamination of public drinking water in Flint, Mich., or the 2014 chemical spill into the public water supply in Charleston, W.Va. — while leading to a dearth of information when such events happen.
“Something will happen, like Flint, and the public will realize they can’t get any information about what happened or why,” he said.
But don’t worry. They have a lying hack in place to deny it all.
Liz Bowman, a spokeswoman for the E.P.A., categorically denied the accounts employees interviewed for this article gave of the secrecy surrounding Mr. Pruitt.
“None of this is true,” she said. “It’s all rumors.”
She added, in an emailed statement, “It’s very disappointing, yet not surprising, to learn that you would solicit leaks, and collude with union officials in an effort to distract from the work we are doing to implement the president’s agenda.”
I don’t believe her. I think she’s lying. Why? Because she works for Trump, and because the Times – Trump notwithstanding – is careful about what it publishes.
Let’s just look up Liz Bowman, shall we?
Ah – there she is. In a story on the industry insiders Pruitt hired for what used to be the EPA.
Liz Snyder Bowman, Acting Associate Administrator for Public Affairs
Bowman is the first of a few names on the list to come from the American Chemistry Council, a lobbying group for chemicals and plastics. Bowman was Director of Issue and Advocacy Communications for the firm, according to her LinkedIn profile. The American Chemistry Council members include Dow Chemical Corporation, Monsanto, DuPont, Exxon Mobil Chemical Company and Marathon Petroleum Corporation, among others.
Henhouse, meet fox.
Back to the Times.
Mr. Pruitt’s efforts to undo a major water protection rule are one example of his moves to quickly and stealthily dismantle regulations.
The rule, known as Waters of the United States, and enacted by the Obama administration, was designed to take existing federal protections on large water bodies such as the Chesapeake Bay and Mississippi River and expand them to include the wetlands and small tributaries that flow into those larger waters.
It was fiercely opposed by farmers, rural landowners and real estate developers.
The original estimate concluded that the water protections would indeed come at an economic cost to those groups — between $236 million and $465 million annually.
But it also concluded, in an 87-page analysis, that the economic benefits of preventing water pollution would be greater: between $555 million and $572 million.
E.P.A. employees say that in mid-June, as Mr. Pruitt prepared a proposal to reverse the rule, they were told by his deputies to produce a new analysis of the rule — one that stripped away the half-billion-dollar economic benefits associated with protecting wetlands.
“On June 13, my economists were verbally told to produce a new study that changed the wetlands benefit,” said Elizabeth Southerland, who retired last month from a 30-year career at the E.P.A., most recently as a senior official in the agency’s water office.
“On June 16, they did what they were told,” Ms. Southerland said. “They produced a new cost-benefit analysis that showed no quantifiable benefit to preserving wetlands.”
She and others say an abrupt backflip like that is highly unusual, especially since actual inquiries into costs and benefits normally take months or years.
“Typically there are huge written records, weighing in on the scientific facts, the technology facts and the economic facts,” she said. “Everything’s in writing. This repeal process is political staff giving verbal directions to get the outcome they want, essentially overnight.”
It’s akin to writing advertising copy rather than making a scientific inquiry.
Experts in administrative law say such practices skate up to the edge of legality.
While federal records laws prohibit senior officials from destroying records, they could evade public scrutiny of their decision-making by simply not creating them in the first place.
“The mere fact they are telling people not to write things down shows they are trying to keep things hidden,” said Jeffrey Lubbers, a professor of administrative law at American University.
Mr. Pruitt had a reputation for being secretive before he ever came to the E.P.A.
While serving as Oklahoma’s attorney general, he came under criticism for maintaining at least three separate email accounts, including one private account that he at times used for state government business.
But his emails!!!
He was asked about it at his Senate confirmation hearing, and he lied in response.
A subsequent lawsuit resulted in the release of some of these other emails, which Mr. Pruitt had asserted did not exist.
“He’s got a serious problem because of his emails down in Oklahoma — he’s burned himself,” said David Schnare, who worked at the agency from 1978 to 2011 and then on the Trump administration’s E.P.A. transition team. “He doesn’t want to take any risks.”
So he just orders the staff to make no notes and keep no records…which ought to be illegal.
Oh well. It’s only air and water and the future of the planet.
