The Best People

by Alexander Nazaryan

  Oklahomans came to form a retinue around Pruitt, including several who had worked with him back home. The most prominent among these were the sisters Millan and Sydney M. Hupp, who had done political work for Pruitt and would serve as two of his closest advisers at EPA headquarters. Sarah A. Greenwalt, a lawyer who worked in the Oklahoma attorney general’s office under Pruitt, joined EPA as a high-ranking adviser.

  Pruitt also attracted an astonishing number of officials who migrated from lobbying groups that had business before the EPA, that business being the eradication of EPA regulations. Samantha Dravis—Pruitt’s closest adviser, who earned a reputation from career staffers as a screamer—had worked for the Republican Attorneys General Association. Dr. Nancy B. Beck, named a high-ranking official in the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, came, like several other Pruitt hires, from the American Chemistry Council, an industry lobbying group that worked to lessen the already not-too-tight regulations on the eighty thousand chemicals used in one form or another in the United States. Sure enough, Beck set about calling into question what had been considered settled science. Under her direction, the EPA moved to lift bans on chlorpyrifos, a harmful pesticide, and perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, a carcinogen.

  William L. Wehrum, who headed the Office of Air and Radiation, sued the EPA thirty-one times on behest of private industry. Robert Phalen, appointed to lead an EPA science advisory board, once expressed disappointment that “modern air is a little too clean for optimum health.”

  Pruitt and his political appointees were sequestered on the third floor, the administrator himself in the lavish, wood-paneled office that had once been the refuge of the postmaster general. Not that most career employees got anywhere near Pruitt’s inner sanctum. They knew that they did not belong on the third floor, where everyone was always pecking away on a smartphone, and where young women in high heels looked like clones of Ivanka Trump (it was hard not to notice that Pruitt, who came to Washington without his wife, surrounded himself with young and attractive women). The hallways were decorated with framed photographs of Pruitt posing with ordinary Americans, carefully curated to showcase people of different races and occupations. There were also photographs of Pruitt and Trump. These were paid for by the American taxpayer.

  White House officials were annoyed when they learned of Pruitt’s taste for expensive interior design. “He wanted the Palace of Versailles for his office,” one of those officials would complain. But there was nothing to be done about it, because Pruitt indicated plainly that he would not take instructions unless they came from Trump himself.

  There was little communication between Pruitt and career staffers. To learn what he had in mind for the EPA, they watched Fox News. The network, for its part, was eager to have Pruitt, and to treat him gently on air. Before several 2017 appearances on Fox & Friends—a program so popular with Trump that it amounted to a daily presidential briefing—producers allowed Pruitt to scrutinize and sign off on the script, a privilege rarely afforded to government officials outside of dictatorships.

  By the late spring of 2017, Pruitt had assembled a formidable shock force of oil-and-gas lobbyists, climate-change deniers, and conservative ideologues. If the work of deconstructing the administrative state were a competition among cabinet members, Pruitt would have easily had the lead. He thought himself immensely good at the task. In public appearances, he often wore a smirk, which seemed to annoy his liberal adversaries to no end. At EPA headquarters, career staffers who had served Republicans and Democrats but had never served anyone like Trump opted for a strategy of “hunker down and survive,” as senior EPA staffer Christopher Zarba put it.

  The work itself was miserable, made so by Pruitt and his appointees. In the spring of 2017, letters poured in from around the country from children of all ages, asking Pruitt about his position on climate change, begging him to do something about this visibly worsening crisis. Career staffers were not allowed to answer letters until responses were vetted by political appointees, who were intent on not making even the slightest concession on global warming. The review could take months. Even then, the result was often an insulting, nonsensical “Thank you.” It pained career staffers to lie to children. Short of resigning, there was nothing they could do.

  “A lot of things had to go through headquarters that didn’t have to go through headquarters before,” said Loreen Targos, a shop steward with the American Federation of Government Employees who worked as a physical scientist in the EPA’s regional office in Chicago. One colleague working on air pollution was constantly bullied with invocations of “cooperative federalism,” a favorite Pruitt phrase that amounted to nothing more than code for the loosening of environmental regulations.

  Some of the political appointees at least tried to make an effort. At briefings with career staffers, Bill Wehrum liked to call himself “the adult in the room,” which everyone understood to be a dig at the increasingly unhinged Pruitt. But his adulthood only went so far. At one briefing, he took umbrage at a report on soil science. “I thought this was supposed to be a neutral report,” he complained. The career staffers were stunned. Scientific findings were apolitical, even if they demanded a political response, and that Wehrum failed to grasp this point was downright chilling. His briefers were also told to stop using the collective plural “we” when discussing such reports. Wehrum found that usage passive-aggressive because it implied that EPA staffers were aligned with scientists. He wanted them aligned with Pruitt.

  On June 1, 2017, the president indicated that he would withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accords, a nonbinding agreement on the reduction of carbon emissions. Pruitt sat in the audience as Trump spoke in the Rose Garden. The next day, Pruitt appeared in the White House briefing room to praise Trump for his “very courageous decision.” Pruitt reminded everyone that “we have nothing to be apologetic about as a country.”

  It would turn out that the most revealing thing said in the briefing room that afternoon would come from Sean Spicer, not Scott Pruitt. In introducing the EPA administrator, Spicer asked reporters to be considerate of Pruitt’s time, since he had “a flight to get to” that Friday afternoon.

  Pruitt was, in fact, flying quite a bit, as later investigations would reveal. Almost every weekend, he flew back home, the trips subsidized by the federal government. One day of pseudo-campaigning around Oklahoma by Pruitt and his staff cost the American taxpayer $14,434. In the first six months of the Trump administration, Pruitt, who had decried the wanton spending of Washington bureaucrats, accrued a travel bill of $107,441.

  Some of this perambulation involved Pruitt meeting with farmers, ranchers, and energy company representatives who wanted a repeal of the Obama-era Waters of the United States rule, which expanded on the regulations of the Clean Water Act. Willing, as always, to play the corporate handmaiden, Pruitt supported the rule’s repeal, crowing about the need for “regulatory certainty,” a nonsensical Orwellianism he especially liked. He even made an advertisement against the rule for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, a lobbying group. Pruitt may not have been especially astute, but he had chutzpah to spare.

  Back in Oklahoma, when he was the attorney general, Pruitt had spent extravagantly on a Tulsa outpost in the Bank of America Center skyscraper, though much cheaper options—such as keeping the Tulsa branch of the attorney general’s office in the Sun Building—were readily available, according to records obtained by E&E News. Pruitt similarly made the most of Washington, too. His office at EPA headquarters was spacious and paneled in dark wood, a monument to public service. Pruitt wanted more, seeing his own importance as only a truly inconsequential man could. Even as he bemoaned the cost of government regulations, he saw no problem with spending nearly $10,000 on decorating his own office, including $2,963 for a standing desk. He spent $1,560 on pens from a high-end Washington jeweler. These, EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox would later explain, were intended for “foreign counterparts and dignitaries.”
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  Career staffers saw through Pruitt’s pompous façade, and rumors of Pruitt’s excesses began circulating among EPA employees. In one story that made the rounds, Pruitt traveled to an EPA site in a western state. He was supposed to exit his van so that an agency photographer could snap a few pictures, but then someone casually mentioned to Pruitt that there were rattlesnakes around. This news spooked Pruitt, and he stayed in the van the rest of his time on the ground. (What a striking contrast this was to Lyndon Johnson, who, when taking a CBS crew around his ranch in the Hill Country of Texas, got out of the car to urinate. This alarmed one member of the crew. “Aren’t you afraid a rattlesnake might bite it?” No, the president was not afraid. “Hell, it is part rattlesnake,” he answered.)

  “We questioned his psychological health,” said career staffer Zarba. There was good reason to. Laughably paranoid about being undermined by EPA officials, Pruitt had a part of his office torn out so that a steel-lined private communication booth, sitting on a floor of concrete, could be installed. Pruitt was later asked, in congressional testimony, why he needed such a booth when one was already available in EPA headquarters. He had no good answer. He also had his office swept for listening devices and outfitted with biometric locks. This madness had a considerable price tag: $43,000.

  At the same time, Pruitt had no compunction about mistreating the people who worked for him. He was known to yell at both senior career employees and political appointees. “His staff was coaching me on how to be yelled at” ahead of a meeting with the administrator, Zarba remembered: “Don’t make a face. Don’t ask questions.” He disregarded the advice. Zarba left EPA on his own terms. In retirement, he would spend his days in Annapolis, sailing. He was one of seven hundred employees who fled the EPA in Pruitt’s first year, nearly a third of them scientists. If there was any true Bannonite deconstruction happening in the federal government, it was at the EPA on Pruitt’s watch.

  The feelings of career staffers were best represented by Michael Cox, a Seattle-area climate expert who had spent twenty-seven years at the EPA. On March 31, 2017, he sent a resignation letter to Pruitt. “I have worked under six Administrations with political appointees leading EPA from both parties,” Cox wrote. “This is the first time I remember staff openly dismissing and mocking the environmental policies of an Administration and by extension you, the individual selected to implement the policies.” The letter contained eight sections. “Please Step Back and Listen to EPA Career Staff,” the last of them was titled.

  This was not going to happen. Pruitt saw himself not as a servant, and certainly not as a bureaucrat, but as a world-historical figure who could take as he pleased because he was above the laws that constrained ordinary men. Just a week after Trump indicated his desire to withdraw the United States from the Paris accords (the withdrawal itself would take time, and Trump would sometimes hint at having second thoughts), Pruitt went to Rome, on a trip organized by Leonard A. Leo of the Federalist Society. Pruitt attended a private mass at the Vatican. He also dined at La Terrazza, the sumptuous rooftop restaurant of the Hotel Eden, with Cardinal George Pell, who stood accused of multiple acts of pedophilia in his native Australia. EPA staffers did their best to keep the meeting secret. In the end, they failed.

  The combination of wanderlust and self-promotion was genuinely impressive. In December 2017, Pruitt went on a trip to Morocco, which was organized by the lobbyist Richard Smotkin. Pruitt pitched Moroccan authorities on American natural gas, an odd bit of salesmanship for the nation’s top environmental regulator. He had also planned a trip to Israel in early 2018, a necessary visit for any American politician trying to make a play for the Jewish-American lobby ahead of a presidential run. But stories about Pruitt’s abuse of power were starting to come out—though not at nearly the rate at which they would be landing come spring—and the preposterously vain and purposeless trip was canceled.

  Within the EPA, there were small acts of resistance to Pruitt’s agenda and excesses, most of which spoke to career staffers’ loathing of Pruitt and also their inability to do much about it. They were powerless, and they knew it, and Pruitt knew it. Still, they tried. At the one-year anniversary of Trump’s inauguration, a prankster graced EPA headquarters with a large poster that showed several photographs of Pruitt and Trump.

  “A Year of Great Achievements for Coal, Gas, and Oil Billionaires,” the poster said, with several bullet points below:

  Strict new “you want it, you got it” policy for corporate polluters.

  Science? Lollll no thanks.

  Super sweet luxury travel for the boss.

  Fired experts, hired sooo many fossil fuel lobbyists.

  I was expressly told not to mention “climate change” on this sign.

  Just like Trump, Pruitt had abettors who encouraged his worst impulses because they figured the arrangement could benefit them.

  Pruitt’s grandiosity (and its attendant paranoia) was helped along by Pasquale “Nino” Perrotta, a longtime security agent at the EPA who had previously worked in law enforcement in New York City, helping to take down members of Italian organized crime. He later moved to federal security work, joining the U.S. Secret Service in 1995 and the EPA in 2004. Despite his employment in the federal government, in 2016 Perrotta decided to also provide security for David J. Pecker, the National Enquirer publisher who was a close ally of President Trump. This was about as kosher as a ham sandwich.

  Perrotta became Pruitt’s security chief after the previous EPA security official, Eric Weese, was dismissed from the position for raising questions about Pruitt’s conduct. Perrotta had no such questions. He stoked Pruitt’s vanity, and benefited in the process. It was the private firm he was running on the side that undertook the gratuitous “sweep” of Pruitt’s office for listening devices. And it was Perrotta who suggested that Pruitt surround himself with an army of nineteen security officers. Interpreting the criticism of ordinary Americans as “threats,” Perrotta urged Pruitt to fly first class, which Pruitt readily agreed to do. Perrotta also had Pruitt travel in an armored Chevy Suburban that leased for $10,200 per year and whose “armor” included bulletproof seats.

  Taking on the trappings of a third-world dictator, Pruitt took his security staff along when his family visited Disneyland, and when he went to see the University of Oklahoma football team play in the Rose Bowl. He wanted his staff to look into a $100,000 per month private jet service. He wanted a bulletproof desk and high-end bulletproof vests, because he imagined himself the potential victim of an assassination attempt. He was that important, at least in his own mind.

  And yes, ordinary people did hate Pruitt, but mostly because they saw him as a vainglorious fool. One of the “threats” against Pruitt used to justify his security expenses cited a Newsweek cover adorned with the administrator’s face, only with a mustache appended. Someone pasted this doctored cover in an elevator at EPA’s headquarters, evidently leading Pruitt to conclude that his life was in danger. Another threat was a tweet directed at Pruitt and Senate Majority Leader McConnell by a person in Paragould, Arkansas. Interviewed by federal agents, the suspect said that they had been “drinking while watching the Rachel Maddow show and posted the tweets as a flippant comment, not realizing at the time that they could be considered a threat.”

  The belief that he was under siege allowed Pruitt to justify any expense, no matter how unnecessary. In one email to other staffers, Perrotta wrote that Pruitt “encourages the use” of sirens when traveling in his SUV. What would have necessitated the deployment of emergency signals? A reservation at Le Diplomate, a favorite Pruitt restaurant in Logan Circle that could be difficult to reach from EPA headquarters during the evening rush. One of his visits to the restaurant came just hours after Trump indicated his intention to withdraw from the Paris accords. The restaurant’s French cuisine had to have tasted especially rich that evening.

  Lavish was the word all around for Scott Pruitt, even as he and Trump looked to cut funding for the agency. Needing a p
lace to live, Pruitt rented a Capitol Hill condominium from Vicki Hart, a healthcare lobbyist whose husband, J. Steven Hart, worked for the corporate lobbying firm of Williams & Jensen (and who had been present at the Trump transition meeting at BakerHostetler’s offices right before the election). The apartment, in a refurbished row house on a prime block, could have easily gone for $3,000 a month, but Pruitt paid only fifty dollars per night, and only on nights when he stayed there.

  Even then, he proved a miserable tenant. He refused to take out the garbage. His daughter McKenna scratched the wooden floors with her luggage when she stayed with him, in violation of the lease (McKenna was a law school student at the University of Virginia; she interned over the summer of 2017 at the White House, and there were accusations that her father’s influence helped her land both prestigious positions). One day, the large security force Pruitt had amassed around himself grew concerned because he wasn’t responding to messages. They broke down the door of the Harts’ condo, only to find Pruitt inside, apparently asleep (by the summer of 2018, unproven rumors about Pruitt’s personal life had become as notorious as horseflies, giving rise to suspicions—some sinister, some silly—whenever a new report about his behavior appeared). The damage amounted to $2,640, to be paid by Pruitt’s fellow Americans.

  There was reason to believe the Harts did not rent to Pruitt out of pure munificence. Despite Pruitt’s unconvincing assertions to the contrary, Steven Hart had business before the EPA pertaining to clients Coca-Cola and the pork purveyor Smithfield Foods. Then there was the Harts’ attempt to pressure Pruitt into hiring a young man Jimmy Guiliano, who had recently graduated from the Naval Academy. “This kid who is important to us,” Steven Hart said of Guiliano in one email to Pruitt’s chief of staff. Despite his purported importance, Guiliano did not get a job at the EPA.

  By early August 2017, Pruitt had apparently had enough of the Harts’ condominium on Capitol Hill. He spent a month in Tulsa, then returned to Washington. He and his wife, Marlyn, moved to a U Street apartment, but as top EPA aide Millan Hupp later said in congressional testimony, “they were not comfortable in the area.” As energy and environment reporter Miranda Green of The Hill noted on Twitter, U Street is “the historical African American district in DC.” An EPA spokesperson told her the issue was actually a noisy Mexican restaurant.