Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt spent nearly half his time in his home state of Oklahoma in the early months of running the agency, according to travel documents obtained by an environmental watchdog group.
The travel documents show that Pruitt was in Oklahoma for 43 of his first 92 days at the agency after being confirmed in February. The travel logs were for March, April and May.
The records obtained by the group Environmental Integrity Project showed that Pruitt made trips to several states to give speeches to industry groups before taking extended weekend trips to his home in Tulsa, the New York Times first reported. The total amount of money spent for the trips was $12,000. The documents were obtained from a Freedom of Information Act request.
Environmental groups immediately used the travel logs as evidence that Pruitt is attempting to build political relationships in his state at the taxpayers’ expense. Pruitt had been a top opponent of the Obama administration’s rules on the fossil fuel industry in his former role as Oklahoma’s attorney general.
“These travel records show that Administrator Pruitt is more focused on cultivating his relationships with industry and conservative political organizations in his home state of Oklahoma than he is on protecting the environment and the public health for the rest of America,” said Eric Schaeffer, the watchdog group’s executive director and former EPA director of civil enforcement.
The EPA refuted the idea that Pruitt is using his time at EPA to lay the ground work for a later political career, which critics of the Trump administration have asserted.
“Administrator Pruitt is committed to serving the president by leading the Environmental Protection Agency; he is not running for elected office,” EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman said in response to the New York Times article.
“The administrator’s travel, whether to Utah, Michigan or Oklahoma, all serves the purpose of hearing from hard-working Americans about how EPA can better serve the American people,” Bowman said.
