While the Republican-controlled Congress has taken a few modest steps to begin scrutinizing some of the many scandals now plaguing Pruitt, the EPA head has succeeded in pursing the Trump administration’s agenda of dismantling critical functions and enforcement capacity of the agency. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Neela Banerjee, senior Washington, D.C. correspondent with Inside Climate News, who discusses her recent article titled, “Pruitt’s EPA Is on the Verge of ‘Regulatory Capture’, which finds that EPA decisions are now based on industry priorities instead of the public interest.
NEELA BANERJEE: The EPA, in its 47-year history, is at the closest point to having its agenda dictated by industry rather than by the central precepts of its founding – and that is the protection of human health and the environment. There is a team of 10 researchers who worked on this study. It’s in a peer-reviewed journal and what they did was they looked at the history of Scott Pruitt’s EPA over the last year or so and the various steps it’s taken to basically roll back all sorts of regulations, not just in the climate space but on other issues as well.
The researchers also succeeded in interviewing, I think, about 45 current and former EPA staff members, including people who’d been there in previous years when other administrations, most notably under Ronald Reagan, tried to roll back regulations. But from what they’ve seen as far as the speed and ambition of what Pruitt was trying to do, what these veterans have seen about what’s happening under Trump vs. under what’s happened under Reagan, they think that this goes much farther than anything else that’s happened in the agency’s history.
BETWEEN THE LINES: I wanted to ask you about Pruitt’s role here because he seems to have struck out a real quirky place for himself in the agency and that he has conducted his business in real secrecy and is trying to prevent information flowing to other staff people in the agency – the careerists who had been there for many years, many decades, trying to keep them isolated. Maybe just speak to the covert action of what’s going on inside the EPA right now.
NEELA BANERJEE: There is a real dismissiveness about the expertise that exists within the EPA. And I think this feeds into the broader narrative within the Trump administration and those who support Trump, that you have this, this “deep state” that works against the interests of Americans, and therefore anything they say is suspect.
NEELA BANERJEE: Right. So Mr. Pruitt currently faces 11 investigations. Most of them are probably through the Inspector General’s office. but there are 11 separate investigations into decisions he’s made, like the money that was spent on the soundproof chamber or booth where you hold certain conversations, to his use of first class tickets.
But where his decision to bypass traditional ethics intersects with his support of fossil fuel agenda has been his housing decisions in D.C. So if you’ll recall last year, between February and August for about six months or so, he was paying $50 a night to stay at a very nice condominium in Capitol Hill that’s owned by the wife of an energy lobbyist. A gentleman in question, Steven Hart, said that he didn’t have any business before EPA; he wasn’t an energy lobbyist. But basically journalists, you know, looked at filings by his company and people did a lot of research and found out that his company at least does lobbying on energy; that he had also reached out to EPA last August on behalf of a client of his, Smithfield Foods, which is a major meat processing concern.And so it would be one thing if he stayed in property owned by a lobbyist at a cut rate price, but the fact that the lobbyist works on issues that are within the purview of EPA shows this kind of intersection of his priorities and his certain attitudes towards ethical guidelines.
