Washington
Pruitt, who sued the EPA repeatedly while raising money from oil and gas interests who stood to benefit from those lawsuits, is expected to make dramatic changes at an agency created during the Nixon administration to enforce new laws such as the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act.
EPA employees are bracing for layoffs and elimination of programs dealing with climate change and wetlands protections. In a last-minute lobbying campaign, the labor union that represents EPA employees urged their members to call senators and ask them to vote against Pruitt. Environmental groups spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a media campaign against Pruitt.
Yet Democrats couldn’t peel off Republicans to block Pruitt’s nomination. Prior to the vote, only Susan Collins, a moderate Republican from Maine, said she’d vote against Pruitt. Meanwhile, Democratic senators Heidi Heitkamp, of North Dakota, and Joe Manchin, of West Virginia — both of whom represent energy states — said they would support Pruitt. The final vote was 52-46, mostly along party lines, in favor of Pruitt.
Senate Democrats tried to delay the vote until Feb. 27 — hoping to put it off until Pruitt releases emails of his conversations with fossil fuel interests. On Thursday, a federal judge ruled the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office must turn over thousands of emails related to Pruitt’s communications, the result of a 2-year-old lawsuit by the Center for Media and Democracy. District Judge Aletia Haynes Timmons ordered Pruitt to turn over the records by Tuesday.
Democrats said they were also frustrated that Pruitt didn’t provide more information about the political action committees he was involved with while heading the Republican Attorney General’s Association.
“This is a man who ran a multimillion-dollar dark money operation,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., said on Friday. “There is one hell of a conflict of interest around this individual.”
Pruitt’s supporters say he’s been the victim of a smear campaign.
“The key thing on Scott Pruitt he is very passionate about the law, in following the law,” said Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., in comments to National Public Radio on Friday. “I have no question he will follow the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, as it is written.”
Lankford added, however, that states should have the first responsibility in enforcing such laws. As EPA administrator, Pruitt is expected to be receptive to state requests to handle programs normally administered by the EPA. Environmental groups fear that, without EPA oversight, states with influential energy interests will scale back regulation of oil and gas fracking, power plant pollution and filling of wetlands.
With Pruitt’s confirmation, the White House is expected to quickly roll out executive orders gutting the EPA’s climate change work and controls on power plant emissions. On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to roll back the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan and a water jurisdiction rule aimed at protecting wetlands.
Conservatives are urging Pruitt to significantly cut the EPA workforce. Myron Ebell, a climate change skeptic who formerly headed the EPA transition team for Trump, has talked about cutting EPA’s 15,000 employees by as much as two-thirds.