Scott Pruitt’s agency for pillaging the environment

Almost every week, a different member of the administration perpetrates an outrage against ethics in government or common decency. Last week it was Secretary of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Scott Pruitt’s turn to provide yet another example of the ethical shabbiness that prevails within the Trump machine.

Pruitt, it turns out, has been staying at a condo in the super-expensive Capitol Hill area of Washington, D.C. for fifty bucks a night. You would be hard-pressed to find a Motel 6 in the sticks for that price. What’s the catch?

The condo is owned by a lobbyist and Pruitt is cozy with fossil fuel honchos, chemical industry chiefs, and their lobbyists. To convey the appearance that he was paying market value for his lodging, Pruitt signed a lease at $1,500 a month. But the generous lobbyist/landlord would only charge him for the nights he stayed there. A curious arrangement, and a corrupt one so petty it boggles the mind.

There are good reasons lobbyists give Pruitt sweetheart deals. Since President Donald Trump named Pruitt to head the EPA, he has turned the mission of the agency on its head. Under Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency might as well be renamed the Environmental Pillaging Agency (APE).

Pruitt has taken a wrecking ball to every environmental protection regulation he has had the time to undo, and there’s more to come. Pruitt’s praxis is simple: ensure that protecting the environment never gets in the way of profits.

I use the fancy word praxis, which means customary practice or conduct, because Pruitt has been messing with the environment and the EPA for years, suing the agency constantly since the days when he was Attorney General of Oklahoma. Undermining environmental protection for Pruitt is customary practice for him, second nature. Only now he can do it from the inside and cause far more damage. He can dynamite the agency from its foundations. He has.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) notes:

“…since the Trump Administration took office, the Environmental Protection Agency’s policies on toxic chemicals have largely been written by and for the largest chemical manufacturers like Dow, Exxon and Monsanto. A host of industry-supported decisions—withdrawing a proposed ban on the toxic pesticide chlorpyrifos, weakening the way the agency reviews of the safety of new (and existing) chemicals—will likely result in a greater number of cancers contracted over time, as well as more instances of developmental delay, neurological impairment and reproductive harm. But another decision by President Trump’s appointees—EPA Anti-Administrator Scott Pruitt and Toxic Chemical Enthusiast Nancy Beck—is already responsible for verifiable and actual deaths, with more almost certain to occur.

“One of the last actions taken by EPA during the Obama Administration was to propose a ban on the use of a toxic solvent in paint strippers. The chemical, methylene chloride, turns to carbon monoxide in the body—and can quickly overwhelm workers and consumers, even when wearing masks or respirators, resulting in rapid asphyxiation and heart attacks (it is also a likely cause of several kinds of cancer). More than 50 people have died in the U.S. from accidental exposure to methylene chloride since 1980.”

Although the scale of the horror is incomparable, there is something about Pruitt that reminds me of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann didn’t turn on the lethal gas but he was the man that kept the killing machine running smoothly. Pruitt doesn’t sell deadly paint thinner. But he writes the rules that make it possible for it to be on the market, and that costs human lives.

Where does Trump find all these characters that range from the distasteful (Sarah Huckabee Sanders) to the downright despicable (Pruitt, Mnuchin, Sessions)?

Although this column is about Pruitt, it is worth asking the question because Trump is the one that selects the players and directs the orchestra. And the result is that every couple of days, a different high-ranking member of Trump’s supporting cast is in the headlines, and it’s never pretty.

Last week it was John Bolton, the ugly American par excellence who President Donald Trump named National Security Adviser. It was quickly revealed that he had been at the head of the line in obtaining data for partisan use from Cambridge Analytica, which collected millions of Facebook profiles without anyone’s consent.

Before Bolton there was Hope Hicks, the aid closest to the president, who left the White House after having participated in the writing of misleading memo about the meeting between Donald Trump, Jr. and Russians at the Trump Hotel, confessing she sometimes told white lies for the President, and trying to defend her former top White House aide whose two former wives have accused of physical abuse.

The ethical faults of the Trump administration are not the worst thing about it. That would be the lack of human decency and compassion demonstrated by, among many other examples, withdrawing health care coverage from people who can’t afford private insurance. It is Trump declaring he is throwing the DACA kids under a bus while the President was on the way to church to celebrate Easter Sunday. Trump knows how to ridicule but he has no sense of irony.

Yet the ethical vacuum and the absence of any social conscience that characterize this administration are two faces of the same coin, selfishness elevated to a philosophy. Take Trump’s appointment of Pruitt. It shows a disregard for the welfare of other people, especially workers, who live in the heavily polluted inner cities and do agricultural work. They will suffer the worst health effects of dirty air and water as Pruitt’s EPA loosens every anti-pollution regulation in the law books.

In transforming the Environmental Protection Agency into the Agency for Pillaging the Environment, Pruitt has turned one of the most benign arms of government into one of the most dangerous.