Mr. Pruitt has been averse to science and fact from Day 1. Last fall, he announced that scientists who receive or had received federal research grants would be barred from serving on the agency’s nearly two dozen scientific advisory committees. The purpose, he said, was to eliminate conflicts of interest; the real purpose, it soon became clear, was to create vacancies that he could fill with industry experts and state officials pushing for lax regulations — people whose own conflicts of interest would be left unexamined. As Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists noted at the time, Mr. Pruitt’s claim that federal funding should exclude scientists from an E.P.A. advisory board while industry funding should not exclude them was on its face absurd.

Though the E.P.A. is the epicenter of denial, avoiding inconvenient truths is common practice elsewhere in the administration. Last year, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke reassigned Joel Clement, the department’s director of policy analysis and top expert on the impact of climate change in the Arctic, to an accounting job (Mr. Clement resigned in protest). Mr. Zinke also ordered the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine to cancel two studies that conflicted with the administration’s goal of expanding domestic fossil fuel production. One was examining the health risks of people living near surface coal mining sites in Appalachia; the other sought ways of strengthening the department’s oil and gas safety inspection program.

Even the official vocabulary of global warming has changed, as if problems can be made to evaporate simply by describing them in more benign terms. At the Agriculture Department, for instance, staff members are encouraged to use terms like “weather extremes” instead of “climate change.” Web pages about global warning have been removed, edited or buried throughout the government. Last week, lest there be any confusion in the hinterlands, E.P.A. staff members in regional offices received a list of talking points instructing them to tell people that “clear gaps remain including our understanding of the role of human activity” on global warming. This is vintage Pruitt: Sow doubt whenever possible about established science.

Mr. Trump’s economic advisers have reinforced this bias. His latest budget called for big funding cuts and in some cases elimination of programs aimed at protecting human health and building resilience against the effects of climate change — among them the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s coastal research program and the Energy Department’s energy efficiency and advanced technology programs. Congress wisely denied these cuts, thanks to hard work by Charles Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leaders of the Senate and House. Whether their efforts do anything to change the mind-set of Mr. Trump and his lieutenants remains to be seen.

Mr. Pruitt is widely believed to be positioning himself for a run for governor in his home state, Oklahoma; he also seems to covet the attorney general’s office, and, astoundingly, is said to harbor presidential ambitions. But he and Mr. Zinke are unlikely to go anywhere soon, and as long as they have the support of the denier in chief, we can expect more disrespect for science and its practitioners.