In the more than seven months since he became administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt has been on a reckless mission to dismantle public health safeguards and environmental protections. Mr. Pruitt’s E.P.A. wants to postpone or roll back dozens of rules that save lives and provide clean air and water, including efforts by the Obama administration to combat climate change and to protect rivers and streams from pollution.

Last week brought more bad news: Mr. Pruitt is proposing to end a decades-long agreement with the Justice Department that funds the E.P.A.’s lawsuits against polluters responsible for creating hazardous waste sites. Neither Congress nor the courts will have the final say. The decision rests with the Trump administration.

Since the Reagan administration, the E.P.A. has reimbursed the Justice Department for the cost of suing companies as part of the Superfund hazardous waste site cleanup program. In communities like the Love Canal neighborhood in Niagara Falls, N.Y., and Times Beach, Mo., the Justice Department sued polluters to force them to pay the cost of relocating residents. More recently, the E.P.A. covered the upfront costs of suing the W. R. Grace chemical conglomerate in the small town of Libby, Mont., where hundreds have died from asbestos poisoning, and compelling General Electric to clean up decades of PCB pollution that ravaged the Hudson River.

But in its budget proposal, the E.P.A. said it no longer intended to reimburse the Justice Department for Superfund litigation costs.