Over the course of the past 14 months, Trump officials have vied heroically for the title of Most Corrupt Member of the Administration, a distinction that presumably comes with a senior role at the Trump Organization once this whole house of cards comes tumbling down. And reader, the competition has been fierce. Earlier this month, we learned that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has spent nearly $1 million flying on either military or private planes when commercial flights would have sufficed, choosing “the most expensive flight options available at every turn, appearing to never even consider flying commercial as his predecessors did.” Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who runs his department like he’s the Queen of England, has also acquired a taste for luxe travel accommodations, blaming Barack Obama for his staff’s inability to produce documents justifying his decision to stay as far away from coach as possible. Recently fired V.A. chief David Shulkin used a made-up award to take his wife on a taxpayer-funded jaunt to Europe (but of course, that’s not the reason he was shown the door). First Son-in-Law Jared Kushner has taken meetings with financial executives, and subsequently scored half a billion dollars in loans for the family business, in which he retains a financial stake. (Kushner has pushed back on the idea that the former influenced the latter, as have both companies involved.) H.U.D. Secretary Ben Carson is out there acquiring $31,000 dining sets for his office and using the old “it was for safety reasons” excuse. But this week, one Trump official looked at his colleagues and clearly thought, child’s play. Because while Mnuchin and Zinke may be ringing up hundreds of thousands in airfare, and Carson is invoicing taxpayers for his high-priced interior-design choices, E.P.A. Administrator Scott Pruitt is shacking up with lobbyists in an arrangement that doesn’t look great!

After learning on Thursday that Pruitt had spent the better part of last year living in a top energy lobbyist’s townhouse, on Friday it emerged that he wasn’t exactly paying market rate to do so. According to Bloomberg, Pruitt’s rent was just $50 a night, but that he only paid for nights he stayed at the apartment, which is not how most leases work. Considering that the E.P.A. chief frequently flies around the country for work—previously only in first class, because someone was mean to him once—it seems he scored a pretty sweet deal thanks to the selfless generosity of J. Steven Hart, the chairman of a firm whose clients include a bevy of energy companies, and his wife, Vicki Hart, a health-care lobbyist. In total, Pruitt reportedly paid $6,100 over roughly six months, in a neighborhood where other units have rented for $5,000 per month. Oh, and apparently his daughter lived there while serving as a White House intern in 2017, though the owners say they don’t know anything about that.

In a statement to the E.P.A.’s inspector general, Craig Holman, an ethics specialist at nonpartisan watchdog Public Citizen, wrote: “Since Administrator Pruitt is already involved in allegations of accepting gifts of travel, the question arises whether a sense of entitlement may have led him to violate the gift rules on this rental arrangement as well.” He noted that the living situation would “at least constitute a violation of the federal statutes and executive branch rules prohibiting gifts to covered officials from prohibited sources.” Pruitt, clearly, stopped giving a f--k about conflicts of interest a long time ago, if he ever gave any in the first place.

But in all of the drama of his housing deal, we should not lose sight of an important point: Pruitt would likely be turning the E.P.A into a polluter’s paradise regardless of whether he was simultaneously saving thousands on rent. In the past year, he’s made it his job to dismantle every effort made by the Obama administration to tackle climate change, including, as The New York Times reported on Thursday, rolling back provisions requiring cars to be cleaner and more fuel efficient. This, naturally, has delighted every industry that stands to profit from his all-out assault on science and facts—that he’s holed up in a sweet townhouse practically rent-free is just the coal-soaked cherry on top.