So if he hates the EPA so much, why is he fighting for more funding for it? In the past few weeks, I’ve heard some legal experts wondering if his goals for the EPA don’t gel with the White House’s, at least on some points.

When you listen to the president’s advisors, they indicate near total hostility for the EPA’s mission. Stephen Bannon, a senior advisor to Trump, has famously preached the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” Mick Mulvaney, the White House budget director, told reporters on Thursday that: “We’re not spending money on [climate change] anymore. We consider that to be a waste of your money.”

Trump has promised the same. In a Republican primary debate last year, he said that “we are going to get rid of [the EPA] in almost every form.”

Certainly Pruitt shares many of these goals. During his confirmation process, he could not name a single rule under the Clean Air Act or Clean Water Act that he supported. As attorney general of Oklahoma, he sued the agency 14 times, and he’s said that the EPA should cede much of its power back to states (even as he reportedly prepares to fight California’s special ability to restrict air pollution).

Pruitt is a savvy attorney who knows the EPA’s guiding statutes well. His statements and behavior suggest that he doesn’t want to temporarily injure the agency by defunding it. Instead, he wants to permanently hobble it by inscribing weak rules that will outlast his term as administrator and the Trump presidency.

But that will take a lot of employees and a lot of time.

“It’s really staff intensive to rescind a rule and then replace it,” says Ann Carlson, a professor of environmental law at the University of California Los Angeles. “To the degree that you have a vision about how the agency should operate, you need a staff and leadership.”

And Pruitt will have to rescind and replace a lot of rules. President Trump has already asked him to replace car fuel-efficiency standards and the Waters of the United States rule, which sets the legal authority of the Clean Water Act. The EPA is also expected to withdraw Obama’s Clean Power Plan soon, which limits greenhouse-gas emissions from the power sector.

Every one of these revisions or revocations will set an onerous bureaucratic process in motion that will last for years. Every time an EPA policy changes, agency employees have to draft the text of a new rule, then hire outside consultants to calculate its economic effects and public-health consequences. Other employees process the tens of thousands of public and industry comments that greet the proposal or withdrawal of any rule. Each of these comments must be read, categorized, and replied to.

Over time, for each of these changes, the employees build up an “administrative record” that supports the agency’s decision to endorse a certain rule. An administrative record is bookshelves and bookshelves of binders describing the EPA’s process, basically. And when the agency gets sued over a new rule, as it almost always does, all those binders come in handy.