Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt said Wednesday that he has killed huge pay raises for two aides and that he did not know his agency had given the raises after the White House rejected them.

Pushing back on the substance of one of the many scandals facing the embattled EPA chief, Pruitt told Fox News that his staff approved the raises without his knowledge and he only found out about it from media reports.

“I found out about that yesterday and changed it,” Pruitt said. “[The] process should have been respected and I issued a statement walking back those pay raises that should not have been given. There will be some accountability.”

Pruitt seemed to suggest that he retroactively took away the pay raises after learning about them.

“They did not get a pay raise,” Pruitt said. “They did not. I stopped that yesterday. It should not have happened. And the officials that were involved in that process should not have done what they did.”

The Atlantic reported Tuesday that the EPA used a provision of a water law to give two aides substantial salary increases. Both of the employees worked for Pruitt when he was Oklahoma's attorney general.

Millan Hupp received a 33 percent raise to make $114,590 as a top deputy to Pruitt, doing his scheduling and advance operation.

The 26-year-old staffer received the pay raise after overseeing Pruitt’s search for permanent housing in Washington, when Pruitt moved out of a $50-per-night bedroom of a condo as his temporary residence. According to the Washington Post, Hupp conducted the housing search sometimes during office hours.

The other staffer, EPA senior counsel Sarah Greenwalt, received a more than 52 percent pay raise, from $107,435 to $164,200.

To give the raises, the EPA used a 1977 provision of the Safe Drinking Water Act that authorizes the agency to hire up to 30 people without the approval of the Senate or the White House. It used the provision because the White House refused to raise the two women’s pay.

The authority from the water law is granted directly to the EPA administrator, allowing him or her to set determine salary levels themselves.

The provision was designed so the EPA could quickly hire senior management and scientific personnel during times of critical need. Critics say those qualifiers do not apply in the case of Pruitt’s former political staffers from Oklahoma.