You're doing a great job, Pruwie

One of the few benefits of leaving a job is that you get to tell the truth to the people you’ve worked for:

“I, along with many EPA staff, are becoming increasing alarmed about the direction of EPA under your leadership … ” [Mike] Cox said in a letter to Pruitt. “The policies this Administration is advancing are contrary to what the majority of the American people, who pay our salaries, want EPA to accomplish, which are to ensure the air their children breath is safe; the land they live, play, and hunt on to be free of toxic chemicals; and the water they drink, the lakes they swim in, and the rivers they fish in to be clean.”

The thing about an agency like the EPA, is that when you staff a place to enforce environmental laws, it tends to attract people with an interest in … enforcing environmental laws. Those people also tend to be knowledgeable in environmental science and prone to acting based with the real, scientific data that their jobs produce. So when a new regime comes along that doesn’t value the environment, doesn’t value science, doesn’t value facts, and doesn’t value them, the resulting attitude in the agency can be a bit less than peak.

But unlike Mike Cox, who is retiring after 25 years on the job, people still working at the EPA are frightened to say just how bad things really are since Pruitt assumed the helm.

Twice during an hour of interviews for this column, EPA workers in different parts of the country asked to communicate with me by using encryption software. All who spoke feared retaliation and would not allow their names to be used. “It is pretty bleak,” one staffer, an environmental engineer, said about employee morale. … They and their colleagues are dedicated to EPA’s mission to “protect human health and the environment.” They fear that Trump administration policies will do the opposite.

Not always. Only on those points where it could possibly generate one more penny of profit.