Pruitt can’t simply repeal all the rules he doesn’t like, so he’s had to embrace a different strategy: stall. There’s a massive, unprecedented slowdown going on across the EPA Whatever he decides, Congress, courts, industry, and activists will be watching. Pruitt will have to choose between knock-down, drag-out legal fights to deliver for his allies in industry or fold and grudgingly enforce environmental rules. States are now suing to block Pruitt’s regulatory changes, and federal judges are starting to force him to speed up. This year is again shaping up to be momentous.
Since the EPA’s inception, it’s been the judiciary that’s again and again beaten back attempts to undermine the agency from the inside.
But some lawmakers and the courts are starting to catch onto him. “You stop enforcing those regulations and that number will go way up,” she said.Ĭhaos at the White House and on Capitol Hill has provided Pruitt cover to quietly position himself, his critics argue, as the greatest threat to the EPA in its entire existence. “It’s that simple.” Some 230,000 Americans already die each year due to hazardous chemical exposures. “People will get sick and die,” Christine Todd Whitman, who served as EPA administrator under President George W. With more staff and funding cuts looming, even fewer toxic chemicals and other environmental hazards will be measured, and the statutes that protect against them won’t be enforced.
His EPA has also collected far fewer fines from polluters than any of the last three administrations during the same time. He’s steering the EPA’s work at an agonizingly slow pace, delaying and slowing the implementation of laws and running interference for many of the sectors EPA is supposed to regulate. This is the EPA administrator whose tenure has also been marked by highly unusual, even paranoid, precautions: armoring himself with a 24/7 security detail, building a $25,000 secret phone booth in his office, spending $9,000 to sweep his office for surveillance bugs, and hiding his schedule from the public.īut some of the biggest, and most overlooked, changes Pruitt has made at the EPA have come by not doing anything at all. Yet when he reflected on his first year in office in a recent report, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt celebrated the rollback of 22 regulations under his watch, and cheered President Donald Trump’s rejection of climate science and policy. The mandate of the head of the Environmental Protection Agency is to protect human health and enforce environmental regulations.
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