7 questions to ask about EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s Meeting with President Trump

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is scheduled to visit with President Trump today at 3:00.

It should be a friendly meeting: Yesterday, Pruitt told Bloomberg News: "My desire each day is to bless the president and the decisions he’s making."1

Here are seven questions worth asking following today’s meeting:

1. Why are Pruitt and Trump fighting for 30 percent cuts — more than any other agency — that would take the EPA back to the 1970s?  They would reverse decades of progress cleaning up pollution, including toxic substances that foul our drinking water, air and soil.  The cuts would lay off thousands of scientists and experts that states depend on for assistance.

2. Why is the EPA backing off on corporate polluter enforcement? Pruitt says, “We are going to do enforcement, to go after bad actors and go after polluters.”  But Trump and Pruitt have called to slash funding for EPA’s enforcement, including 37% cuts to Superfund enforcement. And civil penalties for environmental violations have already dropped 60 percent.2  Environmental crime is already the largest area of corporate criminal activity, according to the US Sentencing Commission. And in 2/3 of the country, there is either no EPA presence or only one criminal investigator for the entire state.

3. How can Trump and Pruitt cut disaster funding as hurricanes and wildfires grow worse?  The Trump-Pruitt budget would cut 35% from chemical facility safety efforts.  It would cut almost 40% from community right to know and homeland security efforts to assess and secure vulnerable infrastructure and facilities.

1 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-25/epa-s-pruitt-denies-he-s-an-ally-of-polluters-vows-to-get- tough 2 https://www.environmentalintegrity.org/news/penalties-drop-under-trump/

4. Does Scott Pruitt agree with the President that “asbestos is 100% safe once applied”?  President Trump said this: “I believe that movement against asbestos was led by the mob.” 3  The World Health Organization says that more than 100,000 people die of asbestos related cancers and diseases. 4

5. Why is the EPA hiring polluters who will protect their industries?  The EPA is increasingly dominated by industry insiders and lobbyists, people who have spent decades fighting to block environmental safeguards, undermining scientific findings on environmental threats, and organizing contributions to pressure lawmakers.  Michael Dourson, nominated to oversee chemical safety, was a petrochemical industry lobbyist and consultant "in the business of blessing pollution."5

6. How far can the EPA go in putting politics over science?  The EPA has been busy deleting references to climate change on its website, and recently stopped career employees from talking about it at a conference.6  Pruitt has begun purging scientists from “independent” review boards, and using discredited methods to hide the benefits of environmental safeguards.

7. Why are former Republican EPA Administrators so frightened by Scott Pruitt?  “It appears that what is happening now is taking a meat ax to the protections of public health and environment and then hiding it.”7 -William Ruckelshaus, EPA Administrator under Presidents Nixon and Reagan  “The agency created by a Republican president 47 years ago to protect the environment and public health may end up doing neither under Mr. Pruitt’s direction….the evidence is abundant of the dangerous political turn of an agency that is supposed to be guided by science.”8 --Christine Todd Whitman, EPA Administrator under President George W. Bush

For more information, check out EDF’s “Pruitt’s Playbook” at edf.org/pruittsplaybook

3 https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-and-the-art-of-asbestos_us_581b2e4ee4b0570d6d6f0c1d 4 http://www.who.int/ipcs/assessment/public_health/asbestos/en/ 5 https://theintercept.com/2017/07/21/trumps-epa-chemical-safety-nominee-was-in-the-business-of-blessing-pollution/ 6 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-epa-climatechange/epa-cancels-appearance-by-scientists-at-climate- change-conference-idUSKBN1CS03O 7 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/us/politics/scott-pruitt-epa.html?_r=0 8 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/opinion/how-not-to-run-the-epa.html