Scott Pruitt is a great EPA chief and the allegations against him are silly

Now, mind you, the source I'm using here comes with a bit of a caveat. Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist is a bit too disposed to grant Trump a favorable assessment for my taste - and her choice to include the likes of Bill Kristol (who admittedly is not the best poster boy for the basically-object-to-Trump wing of conservatism) among those she cites as off-base anti-Pruitt types - but underneath the unfortunate way she skews on that subject, she's a clearheaded thinker who can draw solid conclusions from assembled facts.

And in her latest piece, she does that convincingly:

 . . unlike so many Republican politicians in the world today, Pruitt has not been deterred. He worked to scrap Obama administration regulations that exceeded EPA authority and harmed the coal industry. He rescinded confusing and contradictory water rules that hurt farmers and ranchers. He shepherded the U.S. departure from the uneven and horribly negotiated Paris climate accord. He is demanding scientific rigor for agency work.

Pruitt is not some anti-environmentalist but someone who wants the EPA to do what Congress charges it with doing to improve the nation’s environment. So he awarded $100 million to upgrade drinking water in Flint, Michigan, and began an effort to eradicate lead poisoning from drinking water. He committed additional funds to deal with the EPA’s botching of the Gold King Mine release that polluted Colorado and Utah.

A more recent example:

Just this week the EPA announced a rollback of Obama fuel efficiency standards that were part of the Paris arrangement, were set too high, short-circuited the regulatory process, and were favoring pick-ups and SUVs over the automobiles hit with the standards. In a statement, Pruitt said, “Obama’s EPA cut the midterm evaluation process short with politically charged expediency, made assumptions about the standards that didn’t comport with reality and set the standards too high.” California is already suing to block the rollback.

Excellent stuff, sir! I just wish we lived in the kind of world where you could forthrightly make the free-market case for the rollback. As in how wrong it is for government to be telling private organizations how to conduct their affairs (as in make their products).


And as for those allegations of - well, whatever, there's a context for each:

The Washington Post sent out an edition of an email newsletter that nicely summed up the coordinated hit on Pruitt. He rented a room that critics say created an appearance of conflict because he got a good rate and the husband of the woman he rented from heads a law firm that does some lobbying. He was approved for the room by an 18-year career ethics person at EPA, but liberal Pruitt opponents are “concerned.” The general rental space also was used by three members of Congress for fundraising on days Pruitt was in town. He wasn’t invited to the events, didn’t attend them, and even if he had no ethics laws would have been violated, but liberal Pruitt opponents are “concerned.”

Supposedly few people in the White House are coming to Pruitt’s defense, particularly if you don’t count the president and his chief of staff, who made calls of support to him. Oh, also, EPA officials considered leasing a private jet for Pruitt to accommodate his travel and security needs but didn’t do it. Yes, that’s really one of the stories.

Also, Pruitt “bypassed” the White House to get raises for two of his top aides who came to DC from Oklahoma. Pruitt didn’t get White House approval to sign off on the pay raises, but EPA officials used an authority that other EPA administrators used to set pay. Pruitt said he wasn’t aware that the actions hadn’t been submitted for White House approval, so he directed his staff to do that.

I'm not ususally keen on arguments based on what-about-ism, but in the case of Lisa Jackson, it's warranted:

The media and activists didn’t treat Obama’s EPA secretary, Lisa Jackson, with any rigor, despite her demonstrable corruption. She used the alias “Richard Windsor” to correspond secretly with people outside of the EPA, including with environmental activists and the man who would lead the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. When this same woman criticized the Trump administration for lack of transparency, almost nobody in the media pointed out how ludicrous a messenger she was. She’s now a VP at Apple. When the EPA broke laws, only conservative media showed any interest.

It’s not that there was no media coverage of the EPA-caused Gold King Mine spill, the EPA-ignored Flint Water Crisis, the EPA administrator misleading Congress, the EPA violating federal propaganda policies, or many other problems under Jackson and her Obama replacement Gina McCarthy, but it was never done with the same bloodthirsty frenzy surrounding Pruitt. Not even a tiny fraction of it.

So hopefully the Very Stable Genius will have someone whisper in his ear something along the lines of "keeping Scott Pruitt in place makes you look like a winner." That's how the good stuff seems to happen in this administration.