Scott Pruitt. Getty Images

For Scott Pruitt, “back to basics” has translated to “back off.”

The Environmental Protection Agency administrator came into office promising to discard his predecessor’s “overreaching” focus on climate change and concentrate on what he called the agency’s real mission: cleaning up the air, water and land.


But instead, Pruitt has rolled back or stalled environmental protections, given the fossil fuel and chemistry industries more sway over public health decisions and taken steps that critics fear will undermine work on pollution cleanups, according to a POLITICO analysis of what he’s accomplished to date. He says he will be tough on environmental crimes, but his agency is also easing up on enforcement and collecting far less in penalties than previous administrations, according to agency watchdogs.

Pruitt is the most unorthodox EPA administrator in decades, an avowed critic of the agency who has alienated much of his career staff. He’s spent heavily on travel to meet with business executives and GOP leaders, who want to see a much weaker EPA and could back Pruitt in a future political campaign. He has declined to disclose his daily schedule, employs a large entourage of bodyguards and built a “privacy booth” for communications in his office. He has questioned manmade climate change and kicked respected scientists off his advisory boards, replacing them with representatives from the businesses and the states he regulates.

Obama and Trump's EPAs compared Actions the Environmental Protection Agency took during the first eight months of the Obama and Trump administrations reflect the differing priorities of each presidency. Type of action 2009 2017 Delay or withdrawal 14 47 Significant proposed rules* 19 2 Significant final rules 15 6 Action on state cleanup plans 213 378 Declarations that areas met or missed standards 28 33 Superfund decisions 54 37 Source: POLITICO analysis of Federal Register data from Jan. 21-Sept. 25 in 2009 and 2017

Still, Pruitt, who regularly references his Christian faith, says God wants people to be stewards of the earth. And an agency spokesman said that so far, Pruitt has visited more than 25 states, taken action on major Obama-era regulations and the nation’s most-polluted sites, and increased the number of EPA enforcement agents, which had declined under the previous administration.

“We’re only 10 months on the job and eight years from today, Americans will be impressed with how President Trump and Administrator Pruitt were able to protect the environment and American jobs,” said EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox.

But Judith Enck, a New York-based regional EPA administrator under former President Barack Obama, said Pruitt’s rhetoric doesn’t match his record.


“You can’t have clean air and you can’t have clean water if you’re going to roll back crucial environmental rules and not enforce the rules we have on the book,” said Enck, who recently returned from seeing hurricane damage in the Virgin Islands. “We’ll see the effects very soon.”

To get beyond the rhetoric and competing claims, POLITICO compared EPA’s Federal Register filings for the first eight months of the Trump administration with the same period for Obama’s presidency in 2009. They show a significant increase in how often the agency has withdrawn or delayed regulations this year, along with a decrease in new regulations. The data also show that Pruitt has sped up approvals of state plans to battle air pollution — a fact that his allies consider a sign of progress, but which environmentalists cite as evidence that he is rubber-stamping lax plans.

Enforcing years-old air pollution standards

Congress has instructed EPA to periodically consider tightening standards for pollutants like smog-forming ozone and lung-damaging soot, based on the latest science about their effects on human health. EPA is in charge of setting national standards and evaluating states’ plans to reach them.

But Pruitt said he wants to meet older air quality rules, like the George W. Bush administration’s weaker 2008 ozone standard, before focusing on more recent ones. He has not announced which regions have failed to meet the 2015 standard, delaying a years-long process for enforcing those limits.