The controversy surrounding Scott Pruitt’s spending on travel and security does not lend itself to easy conclusions.
President Trump’s administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has received media scrutiny far surpassing his Obama-era predecessors. Two factors account for the difference. First, Pruitt has sought to undo many aggressive EPA rules and regulations implemented by the environmentalists who have long run the agency’s energetic bureaucracy. Reporters, particularly those who cover the environment beat, regard such changes with skepticism, sharing, as they do, the activist views of the left-leaning advocates they cover.
Pruitt’s EPA has axed pages of harmful or needless regulations, advised the president to withdraw from the Paris Accord on climate change, dismantled the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, scrapped the longstanding “sue and settle” policy whereby the agency effectively creates regulations by settling lawsuits against it, and generally disregarded the environmental lobby. Pruitt has openly expressed skepticism about the alleged consensus on man-made climate change, and his agency has just announced it will reset the Obama administration’s Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards that regulate the per-gallon gas usage of new automobiles.
Many in the media, to put it plainly, want to get Pruitt. The New York Times’ coverage of Pruitt’s agency, both on its news side and editorial side, is laced with contempt. The relationship between the Gray Lady and the EPA is so frosty that, as Fred Barnes reported in a cover story on Pruitt in our December 25 issue, the agency’s press officials simply don’t take the Times’ calls.
Some of the media revelations about Pruitt’s spending on security and ethics problems strike us as weak. Last week, for instance, the Times reported on its front page that Pruitt was renting space in a condominium owned by a lobbyist friend whose husband, also a lobbyist, owns a firm that represents energy interests. Pruitt paid $50 per night in rent, which would be about $1,500 a month, hardly a scandalously low rate. The report alleged no wrongdoing but only “the appearance of conflict.”
But there is another reason for the intense scrutiny: Pruitt invites it. The Times and the Associated Press have reported that Pruitt spends enormous levels of EPA resources on his personal security. Citing “agency sources and documents reviewed by The Associated Press,” the AP reports that Pruitt spent $832,000 on security in his first three months in office, in large part because he demands “a 20-member full-time detail that is more than three times the size of his predecessor’s part-time security contingent.” Pruitt often flies first-class when taxpayers pay the bill, a practice his office justifies by citing threats to his safety. It’s not clear why larger seats and more legroom make Pruitt safer than the seats near the lavatories in back. And the fact that Pruitt flies coach when he’s paying for his own flights makes the security argument rather unconvincing.
More troubling are the reports, first published by the AP, that at least five EPA officials were punished—reassigned, placed on leave, or demoted—for “pushing back against spending requests such as a $100,000-a-month private jet membership, a bulletproof vehicle and $70,000 for furniture such as a bulletproof desk for the armed security officer always stationed inside the administrator’s office suite.”
Last week, Fox News correspondent Ed Henry asked Pruitt about reports that his agency had used bureaucratic sleight of hand to secure raises for two top employees—and friends of Pruitt—espite White House orders against doing so. Pruitt couldn’t—or wouldn’t—answer Henry’s basic questions about what had happened.
Despite these disturbing allegations, and without a sense of their veracity, some conservatives have rushed to defend Pruitt. It’s an understandable impulse. Pruitt is a movement conservative who has fought hard to advance conservative principles. But Trey Gowdy, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, was right to begin an investigation of Pruitt’s conduct. And if the reports about his profligate spending prove true, the president would be justified to ask for Pruitt’s resignation.
Trump tweeted his support for Pruitt over the weekend, suggesting the president is disinclined to do that. We understand that impulse, too, especially amid reports of chaos at the White House, dysfunction at many other cabinet agencies and the never-ending churn of high-level Trump administration officials leaving their jobs, voluntarily or otherwise.
But if Gowdy’s investigation confirms the public reporting about EPA mismanagement, Pruitt will find himself worried about a different kind of job security.
