The EPA chief has resigned.
Long live the EPA chief.
Scott Pruitt’s 15-month reign over the Environmental Protection Agency was dogged from the very beginning with questions about lavish expenditures and other abuses of power.
[Opinion: Scott Pruitt was seduced by the perks of power]
From private sound booths to trying to score a Chick-fil-A franchise for his wife, Pruitt became as well-known for his love of government perks during his brief tenure as EPA administrator as he was known for his love of deregulation.
In no particular order, here are Pruitt’s top five worst moments of government graft and ethically dubious behavior as EPA chief:
5. The credit card scheme
Pruitt reportedly had his aides ring up his hotel reservations on their personal credit cards, rather than on his own, according to the Washington Post.
“In one instance, according to former deputy chief of staff Kevin Chmielewski, [then-executive scheduler Sydney Hupp] was stuck with a bill of roughly $600 for a booking she had made for the administrator’s family during the transition,” the Post reported. “Chmielewski said in an interview last month that he was in Jackson’s office when Hupp approached Pruitt’s chief of staff to explain that the period for transition reimbursements had expired and that Pruitt had not covered the bill.”
The report added, “The incident … prompted [Pruitt’s chief of staff Ryan Jackson] to leave $600 in cash in Hupp’s drawer.”
4. Soundproof
Pruitt spent $43,000 worth of taxpayer dollars to have a soundproof phone booth built in his office.
My Washington Examiner colleague Philip Wegmann explains the problems here:
3. Helping the wife
Pruitt apparently used his position and resources repeatedly to try to score his wife a well-paying, $200,000-plus-per-year gig, going so far as to directly enlist aides to assist in the job hunt.
The ex-EPA chief even tried to set up a personal meeting with Chick-fil-A Chairman and President Dan Cathy to pitch him on the idea of making the Mrs. EPA Administrator a franchise owner. The meeting didn’t go through.
2. Lobbyists
After Pruitt was confirmed by the Senate in February 2017, he rented a room in the nation’s capital from the wife of a lobbyist whose firm, Williams & Jensen, just so happened to be lobbying the EPA on environmental issues, according Politico. Pruitt was apparently charged only $50 per night, which I can assure you is well, well, well, well below market value in Washington, D.C.
The lobbyist, J. Steven Hart, had also previously donated to a “total of $4,366 in cash and in-kind services to the former Oklahoma attorney general’s campaigns and leadership PAC.”
1. First class
Pruitt racked up more than $105,000 on first-class travel alone in his first 12 months on the job, according to Politico.
Amazingly enough, this number doesn’t include the estimated $58,000 that Pruitt charged to taxpayers “on charter flights and a military jet to carry him and his staff from an event with President Donald Trump in Cincinnati to catch a connecting flight to Europe out of New York.”
We haven’t even touched yet on the more than $1,500 that the former administrator spent on fountain pens from a boutique jewelry shop in Washington, D.C.
Pruitt was a champ when it came to deregulation and streamlining an otherwise labyrinthine bureaucracy. Imagine how much more he could’ve accomplished had he forgone the temptation to behave like a child in a candy shop and subscribed instead to the phrase, “Act like you’ve been there before.”
