January 29, 2018
By Claire Moser and Alison Cassady –
Next month will mark one year for Scott Pruitt as administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). While Pruitt and his team have maintained that he is “solely focused on implementing President Donald Trump’s agenda to protect the environment,” his actions contradict these words.
Rather than upholding the mission of the EPA, Pruitt has continued the pattern he established as the attorney general for Oklahoma, where he sued the EPA 14 times and worked “arm and arm” with the fossil fuel industry. As Politico reported in a review of his actions last year, “Pruitt has rolled back or stalled environmental protections, given the fossil fuel and chemistry industries more sway over public health decisions and taken steps that critics fear will undermine work on pollution cleanups.”
According to a review by the Center for American Progress, in his nearly 12 months in office, Pruitt has taken more than 39 actions to undermine the nation’s public health and environmental protections—despite paying lip service to the agency’s mission.
Here are five ways Pruitt is saying one thing and doing the other.
The mission of the Environmental Protection Agency is “to protect human health and the environment.” Disgraced EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt tried his best to undermine this vital mission by choosing to slash critical health protections and let corporate polluters off the hook. Now that Pruitt’s been booted, we need an EPA administrator dedicated to undoing his toxic agenda and restoring the agency to its core mission. Progress is possible and necessary – but another corporate crony or climate skeptic will not get us there.
Scott Pruitt is gone, but the fight is just beginning. We need an EPA administrator who puts our health and environment first, period. Any alternative is unacceptable.
