The NPR Politics Podcast - EPA Chief Scott Pruitt Resigns Amid Scandals

Episode Date: July 5, 2018

President Trump tweeted this afternoon that he accepted the resignation of Scott Pruitt as head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Pruitt was one of the more controversial of Trump's Cabinet-level picks and had been battling various scandals for months. This episode: Congressional correspondent Scott Detrow, White House correspondent Scott Horsley and national political correspondent Mara Liasson. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, I'm Juliana, and I'm currently sitting poolside to celebrate the 4th of July and my 23rd birthday in my hometown of Altoona, Pennsylvania, the birthplace of Sheets. This podcast was recorded at 425 Eastern on Thursday, July 5th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. All right, here's the show, and happy birthday, America. Scott Horsley, White House correspondent. It's a bad day for Scots. So let's rewind for a second. Here we are back on this surprise weekday after the 4th of July. All of a sudden, as often happens, the whole newsroom is yelling because President Trump has tweeted breaking news. Mara, can you do the honor of reading the tweet today? Donald Trump tweeted today, I have accepted the resignation of Scott Pruitt as the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Within the agency, Scott has done an outstanding job, and I will always be thankful to him for this. And he went on to say that his deputy, Andrew Wheeler, is going to take over for him on an acting basis? We need to talk about a couple things. We need to talk about all the policy pushes that Pruitt has started to put in place at the EPA. But first, we obviously

need to start at the fact that if you had to say Scott Pruitt is out for this scandal or that scandal, you wouldn't even really know where to start. Like we could do a lightning round. Actually, let's do that. Let's do a lightning round of all the different scandals that Scott Pruitt was facing at the moment, like popcorn. Well, there was the sweetheart housing deal where he was renting a room in a condo owned by the wife of a lobbyist for a very attractive rate of $50 a night only for the nights he actually spent there. He was flying frequently first class at government expense. He was spending a lot of money on security or asking for a lot of money on security. He spent tens of thousands of dollars on a soundproof phone booth within his office, as well as a special lock on his office door.

He was also using staffers within the EPA to do personal favors for him, whether it was looking for a place to live or looking for a cushy job for his wife. This was like scandal after scandal after scandal, a lot of which we saw other members of the Trump administration resign or be forced out for far less. And let's not forget, there's been a lot of turnover in this administration. Yet all along, Scott Pruitt seemed to have support from President Trump. What changed today? Well, we're not sure exactly what changed today. What might have changed is that John Kelly has wanted Pruitt to resign.

And John Kelly is thinking about leaving in the medium term future. And this might have been just something he wanted to get done. Scott Pruitt's letter of resignation, which he submitted today, blamed the, quote, unrelenting attacks on me personally and my family. He said they're unprecedented and they took a sizable toll on all of us. And we actually just got that letter. Let me read a little bit about it. This is from the last paragraph. My desire, this is from Pruitt to President Trump, my desire in service to you has always been to bless you as you make important decisions for the American people. I believe you are serving as president today because of God's

providence. I believe that same providence brought me into your service. I pray as I have served you that I have blessed you and enabled you to effectively lead the American people. Right. That goes into the dear leader folder. But I think that this is an example of how the order in the universe is not totally broken. In other words, there were a lot of investigations into his behavior and activities. In one case, he was found to break the law. There were, I think, 15 others that were pending. Inspector General Reports, Congressional Investigations. There was a lot of journalism, basic old-fashioned gumshoe journalism that revealed a lot of these things. Yeah, we should point out a lot of this came out through basic open records requests.

And so this is more or less what's supposed to happen when a cabinet secretary does things like this. At various times, the president has said he was concerned about these allegations. At other times, he said, Scott's doing a great job, and I'm hearing that people really like him. And even in his tweet today, the president said, within the agency, Scott has done a terrific job. So he was sort of separating out the ethical lapses from the actual task that Scott Pruitt was carrying out, which was rolling back the Obama-era climate agenda. Right. And that's really different than his clashes with Rex Tillerson over a policy, for instance. Or his tussles with the former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, who he sort of blamed for some of the early struggles to pass an Obamacare.

The failures, right, the struggles that didn't work out. So there was a tension. But the most important thing to remember is that the basic policy of the Trump administration on the environment is not going to change. Scott Pruitt was not the only person who could carry it out. Right. And let's talk about that for a minute, Scott, because Scott Pruitt was pretty busy. themes of the Trump administration is to unravel, to undo things that the Obama administration did, especially things through executive order or rulemaking that are unravelable. And Scott Pruitt was pretty busy on that front. Chief among the things that he worked hard to undo was something called the Clean Power Plan, which was the Obama administration's approach to how

the United States would meet its Paris climate goals, of course, Trump has pulled out of the Paris climate accord. But the Clean Power Plan short summary of it was that it would force states to move away from coal and toward more renewable energy and toward natural gas to lower their energy carbon footprint. That's right. We should say when the president made his announcement he was pulling out of the Paris Accord last year, Scott Pruitt was at his side in the White House Rose Garden and then sort of put an exclamation point on it by going out to a French restaurant for dinner that night. But Scott Pruitt has been battling the Clean Power Plan and the broader Obama climate agenda since well before he came to the EPA. His last job was as the attorney general for Oklahoma. And in that capacity, he led a group of Republican attorneys general in fighting Obama and the EPA every step of the way. He filed numerous lawsuits against the EPA challenging Obama-era rulemaking. So once he was installed at the EPA, he sort of knew where the bodies were buried and he knew just where to turn.

That said, although he was industrious in challenging those rules, he hasn't necessarily been successful just yet. He is going to run into, he has already run into legal challenges now from Democratic attorneys general around the country who want the EPA to continue to pursue those policies. So he was ambitious and aggressive in trying to roll back Obama-era rules, but a lot of that is still tied up in the courts. Yeah. All right. So we're going to talk about some of the other rules that Pruitt tried to roll back, and we are also going to talk about what may change or may not change at all at the EPA after a quick break. We'll be right back. Call 888-643-6400. Mention promo code NPR for a free Amazon dot with your purchase of ACT. Or visit ACT.com slash NPR to sign up for a free 14-day trial.

ACT. Growth made easy. Hey y'all, I'm Sam Sanders. I host an NPR show called It's Been a Minute. Every Friday on the show, I talk out the week of news. Because sometimes the best way to process everything going on right now is through good conversation. Download the show and we'll process everything together. All right, we're back. Scott, let's talk about a couple of the other things that Pruitt got started at the EPA because it wasn't just getting rid of rules that hurt coal. It was like aggressively boosting coal, which struck a lot of environmentalists

the wrong way, since this is the Environmental Protection Agency. Right. Although it's very much in keeping with the president's agenda, which is to promote the coal industry and the coal miners who helped to put Donald Trump in office. Remember, this was one of the things Trump campaigned on, was we're bringing coal back. Now, coal, as a share of electric generation in this country, continues to decline, mostly as a result of competition from cheap natural gas, but also because of environmental concerns. But certainly, Scott Pruitt went after any kind of regulation that was tough on coal, any kind of regulation that would have discouraged the use of oil or gasoline. One of the first steps that the Obama administration had taken to control climate, even before they did the Clean Power Plan, was to pass very aggressive, ambitious targets for fuel economy,

for cars and trucks, and the EPA is in the process of winding those back as well. Forcing cars to get better mileage, among other things. That's right, and here's an interesting case where the auto industry, which wanted some relief from those higher fuel economy standards, is now worried that Trump and Pruitt and the administration have granted too much relief. They've watered those fuel economy standards down so far that the auto industry may now be faced with dueling standards from California and other blue environmentally minded states and places like Oklahoma. And they really don't want to have conflicting standards in different parts of the country and have to make two different

kinds of vehicles. They really want to have a uniform standard nationwide. So it's the case for the auto industry to sort of be careful what you wish for. But the reason that they might end up having two standards is because California was given a waiver and allowed to set their own standard, now if the Trump administration sets a lower standard, California is going to go to court. That's the problem. The tremendous uncertainty about what the standard will be. The auto industry, like every industry, just wants some certainty. Yeah. And I think they wanted the administration to whittle down the efficiency standard somewhat, but maybe not so much that would prompt California to make a federal case over it. So I want to circle back to something you both said before, and that regulations, his approach of being very skeptical of the idea that climate change is a pressing issue that's probably overdue to be dealt with.

It's pretty common among Republicans and it's pretty common among the types of people that President Trump will keep filling EPA jobs with. Well, I think the important thing, if you're keeping a scorecard on the personnel turmoil in the Trump administration, some resignations are about policy and they signal a shift or a change in policy. Like when Rex Tillerson and H.R. McMaster left, Trump was freer to be a true America firster, you know, freer to push back against NATO and all the international organizations he doesn't like. Pull out of the Iran deal. Right. This one is different. This one is Pruitt was just too swampy for Donald Trump. And it was too kind of against his brand. Yeah, keep the anti-climate agenda, but stop with the grifting. So Andrew Wheeler, the deputy to

Scott Pruitt, who will be acting administrator now, is a former coal lobbyist. And in his tweets this afternoon, the president said he expects Andrew Wheeler to continue to pursue the very same agenda of going after climate rules. Wheeler is a little bit more of a Washington insider. He will probably be savvy enough not to run afoul of the ethical watchdogs in the way that Scott Pruitt did. But don't look for big policy changes when it comes to carbon pollution and the like. But on the whole, he's going to have a lower profile, not just because I think he's not going to get himself in trouble as much. But Scott Pruitt had political ambitions. He was already the attorney general of Oklahoma. I don't think that Andrew Wheeler is planning to run for anything anytime soon.

He wants to be a low-key environmental rulemaker. political question on all of this, because, you know, in our last podcast, we were talking with Asma Khalid about how so many Republicans are sticking with President Trump and his support among Republicans has actually grown over the last year. You know, the swamp arguments when Democrats have been making them against Trump himself, it seems like they haven't really been sticking with people who are already like Trump to begin with. But I wonder, is it an easier political argument to make when you're going against the swampy actions of people who aren't Donald Trump, but in his administration? Do you expect this cavalcade of ethical scandals that Pruitt went through to pop up in Democratic ads over the next few months in the midterms? They might be. It's true that Trump himself seems immune from all the normal political

laws of gravity because people don't care so much what he does. But I think that it doesn't apply to anyone else. I think so far, when we Supreme Court nominee on Monday. Mara, we are reporting that he's whittled that list down to finalists. Who are these people and what do we know about them? At this moment, there are three finalists, two top finalists. That's Brett Kavanaugh, appeals court judge, and another appeals court judge, Amy Coney Barrett. Now, everyone who I've talked to has said, yes, but he could change his mind at any moment. He could add someone to the list. There is a third person, Raymond Kethledge, also an appeals court judge. So Kavanaugh, Kethledge, and Amy Coney Barrett. So until Trump changes his mind or wants to look at other ones, those are the top three that we've been reporting.

We should say the president has said from the get-go that he plans to announce his pick on Monday. So we have a weekend to get through before this made-for-TV announcement. And he's going to be spending the weekend at his golf resort in New Jersey. So there's always a chance that the president can change his mind. All right. And we talked about all three of those potential nominees in the show we did on Tuesday. So check out your podcast feeds there. We will be back in your feed on Monday when we have a Supreme Court pick to talk about that pick. Unless, of course, we were back in your feed before then with any other breaking news. So I might talk to you again tomorrow or I may talk to you again at the end of

August. Really, it's a coin toss at this point. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And I'm Scott Horsley, White House correspondent. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.