Scott Pruitt resigns as EPA administrator

The Senate has officially confirmed former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler for the role of EPA administrator, a position he had taken over in an acting capacity following Scott Pruitt’s resignation last July.

Wheeler, who was confirmed for the EPA deputy administrator role in April 2018, appears to be cut from much of the same cloth as his former boss when it comes to rolling back environmental regulations. Here are three key facts to know about the person who will continue overseeing the Environmental Protection Agency.

Scott Pruitt’s stint as head of the Environmental Protection Agency may have come to a conclusively inelegant end, but his blunders continue to haunt the Trump administration.

Pruitt was forced to resign in July after a flood of alleged ethics breaches became too much for his boss, President Trump, to bear. From Pruitt using his motorcade’s lights and sirens to make dinner reservations to asking his scheduler to help secure a Chick-fil-A franchise for his wife, the administrator’s conduct in office left corruption watchdogs scrambling.

The Environmental Protection Agency is starting to roll back one of the most important Obama-era policies for fighting climate change: fuel efficiency standards. At the same time, the agency is also picking a knock-down, drag-out legal fight with states that want tougher car emission rules.

The EPA justified this proposal by invoking safety, arguing that higher efficiency standards make it harder to buy safer cars. But emails revealed this week that the EPA’s strange rationale didn’t hold up under the agency’s own analysis. In fact, the proposed changes would increase fatalities, as Ellen Knickmeyer reported for the Associated Press:

The Environmental Protection Agency, along with the the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, formally announced Thursday that the agencies will abandon the long-term fuel economy standards for passenger cars and light trucks developed by the Obama administration for 2022-2025, declaring, without evidence, that they are “too high.”

It plans to replace Obama’s standards, which required the auto industry to just about double the fuel economy of vehicles to an average of about 54 miles per gallon by 2025, with ... nothing. Instead, it will simply freeze the standard at the 2021 level.

Scott Pruitt, the scandal-plagued administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency, was forced to resign on Thursday reportedly because President Trump had grown weary of reports of Pruitt’s mounting ethical breaches and allegations this week that he had potentially broken a federal law.

The New York Times reported that Trump was particularly annoyed by reports that Pruitt had wanted the president to fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions and hire Pruitt for the post instead.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is now out, brought down by a cascade of personal indiscretions. But with former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler soon to be at the helm of the EPA, President Donald Trump’s U-turn on the environment shows no signs of stopping.

A couple of years ago, the US was making notable progress on some of our toughest environmental problems. Grassroots mobilizations and other forms of pressure helped nudge America’s political leadership to halt pipelines and craft new policies on climate change, fracking, and toxics. The rest of the world, even China, was coalescing around a commitment to curb greenhouse gases, and the Paris accord had been signed into effect.

Scott Pruitt, administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency, resigned Thursday after the festering pile of alleged ethical and legal breaches — including the $43,000 phone booth, his use of his staffers’ credit cards to make hotel bookings, the deletion of meetings from his calendar and subsequent firing of staff who questioned it — finally became too much for him to manage.

But for three hours, staff at the EPA received no formal announcement, no agency-wide email, about their boss’s resignation. According to three EPA employees I contacted who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak on the record, they learned of it from a Trump tweet:

Triggering the libs — the act of doing something that will outrage Democrats, and then luxuriating in their response — has, for the Trump administration, become an end in itself, a way to throw gasoline on a culture war Trump believes he’s winning. The appointment of Bill Shine, the Fox News executive ousted for hiding decades of sexual assault, to deputy chief of staff, is a case in point.

Already, Trump’s inner circle is gleefully celebrating how hard this will trigger the libs:

Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt is resigning because the public is being mean to him.

That’s the message of his official resignation letter, accepted by President Donald Trump on Thursday and obtained by Fox News reporter John Roberts shortly after the resignation was announced.

Among the latest scandals plaguing EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt: He reportedly called on staffers to make his hotel bookings on their own personal credit cards — and in at least one case, he didn’t reimburse the payment in time.

This revelation was one of many details that have come to light about Pruitt in recent weeks, according to the Washington Post. In interviews last week, two of his top aides told congressional staffers that Pruitt’s use of staff for nonofficial tasks was part of a larger pattern of behavior; the EPA administrator seemingly had no issue with leveraging his staff to address his personal legal problems or help his wife find a high-paying job.

It’s become a weekly routine: New allegations of Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt’s ethical lapses emerge. The media parses the details, like why the EPA spent an unprecedented $4.6 million on security for Pruitt, including $1,500 on “tactical pants.” Democrats call for Pruitt to resign. Republicans stroke their chins with “concern.” Pruitt blames the media and unwinds more EPA regulations. President Trump reaffirms his support for Pruitt, and the controversy gets shoved into the background. Repeat.

These alleged ethical lapses have triggered more than a dozen federal inquiries, audits, and investigations, and the scrutiny isn’t going away. Multiple institutions — including the Government Accountability Office, the EPA’s inspector general, the House Oversight Committee, and the White House — are investigating Pruitt’s indiscretions, including his first class luxury travel, a sweetheart housing deal with a lobbyist, and his use of a loophole to get raises for two close aides.

Among the numerous ethical scandals plaguing Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt are a suspiciously sweet deal on a rental townhouse in downtown DC and using his 24-hour security detail to track down a $37 bottle of lotion. Now it’s tactical pants.

According to expense reports obtained by the Intercept, Pruitt has spent more than $4.6 million in public funds during his tenure, including $24,115 on body armor, protective vests, and “tactical polos and pants.”

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt’s nonstop scandals are finally beginning to test the patience of some of his staunchest political allies.

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) has been one of Pruitt’s biggest patrons. Pruitt previously served as Oklahoma’s attorney general, and the two have known each other a long time. One of Inhofe’s former aides, Andrew Wheeler, is now Pruitt’s second-in-command at the EPA.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt made his staff run personal errands like fetching Greek yogurt and protein bars. He had his full-time security detail hunt for a Ritz-Carlton lotion. He had an aide ask for a used Trump hotel mattress. He tried to score a Chick-fil-A franchise for his wife.

These stories have been dominating news coverage of the EPA boss (except on Fox News). They prompted smirks and snark, but they’re hardly the most important developments at the agency.

If you watch Fox News, you probably don’t know about Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt’s vast array of scandals.

The latest, according to a Washington Post report Thursday, is that Pruitt sent an aide around DC to find a specific Ritz-Carlton lotion.

The tomfoolery of Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency’s leader, has reached a new level, somehow.

This week, we learned that he directed an aide, Millan Hupp (who has since resigned), to run personal errands for him last year, including looking into buying a used mattress from the Trump International Hotel, finding housing, and booking vacations.

Members of Congress, including some Republicans, are starting to grow weary of Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt’s seemingly endless parade of scandals.

Recently, Pruitt’s alleged abuses of power have involved Chick-fil-A franchises, a secondhand mattress from a Trump hotel, and, per the latest reports, a particular brand of lotion that’s apparently a Ritz-Carlton special.

The never-ending series of scandals swirling around Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has developed an amusing new dimension with the revelation from the Washington Post’s team of Juliet Eilperin, Josh Dawsey, and Brady Dennis that Pruitt has been using his security detail to, among other things, go shopping for a special moisturizer available at Ritz-Carlton hotels.

It’s difficult to know exactly how to classify the severity of various different Pruitt scandals at this point.

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released a letter Monday highlighting how a close aide to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt helped him secure housing and personal items.

The aide, Millan Hupp, acknowledged that one of the tasks was finding an “old mattress” for Pruitt from the Trump International Hotel, while she was on the clock.

A national summit on drinking water contaminants at the Environmental Protection Agency this week was so exclusive that reporters from E&E News and CNN were turned away at the gates.

EPA guards didn’t just keep some reporters out of the meeting; they shoved one reporter trying to cover it, the Associated Press’s Ellen Knickmeyer.

In a hearing before the Senate, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt confirmed on Wednesday for the first time that he has set up a legal defense fund to deal with his snowballing ethical improprieties.

Pruitt largely deflected and denied the allegations of wrongdoing from lawmakers, though there are at least a dozen inquiries into the EPA under his watch, and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) already concluded that at least one indiscretion, Pruitt’s $43,000 phone booth, violated two laws.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt is trying to hold onto his job as new details about his bloated security team, and his ethically dubious hiring and housing arrangements continue to leak.

As he’s made the rounds at conservative media outlets and in front of Congress to tout his accomplishments and swing back at critics, Pruitt has made some outlandish claims.

Just when you thought the Scott Pruitt scandals couldn’t get more bizarre, a wild story is unfolding between the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior.

An aide to Pruitt, the embattled EPA administrator, reportedly tried to take the heat off his boss, who has been mired in negative headlines in recent weeks for excessive spending and security, a condo rental from a lobbyist that was far below market rate, and a brutal congressional hearing, by shopping negative stories about Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, the Atlantic’s Elaina Plott reported.

Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, showed up for two long hearings on Capitol Hill Thursday bracing for a beating from lawmakers.

Ethics concerns about Pruitt cropped up almost as soon as he was sworn in last year, but new allegations, ranging from renting a cheap condo from the wife of a lobbyist who represented clients at the EPA to sidelining employees who objected to his expensive travel, have piled up in the past three months. Now environmental groups, Democrats, and a few Republicans are calling for his immediate resignation.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt will face a double whammy of hearings on Capitol Hill Thursday that could make or break his career at the EPA. You can watch the C-SPAN livestream here.

The hearings were originally intended to give Pruitt the chance to pitch his agency’s budget for the upcoming fiscal year. But members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the House Appropriations Committee, including some Republicans, are expected to grill Pruitt over his growing list of alleged ethical lapses.