[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 80 (Wednesday, May 16, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2713-S2715]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
EPA ADMINISTRATOR PRUITT
Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here today for my 206th ``Time to
Wake Up'' speech.
For colleagues who may be having a hard time keeping up with the
ethical scandals swirling around Environmental Protection Agency
Administrator Scott Pruitt, I thought today I would lay them out one by
one.
I think we all heard Donald Trump's pledge to drain the swamp and to
put an end to government corruption. That hasn't exactly worked out;
has it? Instead, swamp creatures abound, and Pruitt, a longtime enemy
of the Agency he now runs and a longtime toady of the fossil fuel
industry he is supposed to regulate, is absolutely wallowing in the
swamp. Indeed, he is so swampy that he now faces more than a dozen
Federal and State probes exploring how he has been advancing his own
interests and those of his polluter donors. So let's take a look.
Investigation No. 1 is travel expenses. Between March and May of
2017--just that short period--Mr. Pruitt spent 43 out of those 92 days
traveling to his home State of Oklahoma. Pruitt appears to have
conducted little or no official business on many of these trips. Yet
taxpayers still picked up the tab.
Last summer the EPA inspector general opened its inquiry into this
use of official resources. That inquiry has actually since been
expanded to examine the overall frequency, cost, and extent of the
Administrator's travel. Over a 6-month period in 2017, Pruitt is
estimated to have racked up nearly $200,000 in travel expenses. This
includes a $7,000 business-class flight to Italy and $58,000 spent on
military and charter flights. One set of flights to Oklahoma on a
chartered private jet cost over $14,000 alone.
Also under scrutiny is a 4-day trip that Mr. Pruitt, his staff, and
his security detail took to Morocco in December. I hear it is lovely in
Morocco in December, but it cost taxpayers more than $100,000 to
indulge Mr. Pruitt. EPA first justified the trip by saying that Pruitt
was there to promote the U.S. liquefied natural gas industry. That is
actually not in EPA's mission--but never mind. Pruitt himself then
testified before the House that he was there to negotiate part of a
free-trade agreement. Again, that is not part of EPA's mission. Plus,
there is no evidence that Pruitt even conferred with our Trade
Representative. You would think that he might have picked up the phone
to give himself just a little bit of cover if that was going to be his
story. It was eventually reported that Pruitt's Morocco junket was
largely arranged by a lobbyist friend who later was paid $40,000 a
month--$40,000 a month--retroactively to January 1, to represent the
Moroccan Government.
[[Page S2714]]
Pruitt's frequent international travel plans are heavily influenced
by lobbyists and rightwing donors. His trip to Rome appears to have
been largely orchestrated by the head of the Federalist Society, and it
included dinner at a five-star hotel with Cardinal George Pell, who has
been under investigation for multiple allegations of child sexual
assault. The cardinal is a climate denier. So maybe that makes it all
OK for Pruitt.
A planned trip to Australia was organized by a consultant and former
lobbyist for foreign governments. Another planned trip to Israel
appears to have been at least in part scheduled to allow him to promote
a water purification company recommended by Republican megadonor
Sheldon Adelson. Reports say Pruitt actually gave his staff a bucket
list of places he wanted to visit at public expense, and he told them
to arrange pretexts for his travels.
A lot of the cost of these trips is Pruitt's security detail. That
takes us in to investigation Nos. 2, 3, and 4, which stem from
Administrator Pruitt's over-the-top spending on security measures.
The Environmental Protection Agency's inspector general and the House
oversight committee are both investigating this spending, including
almost $3 million that Pruitt has spent on his 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-
a-week, 20-person security detail. This security phalanx accompanies
him everywhere--on personal travel home to Oklahoma and on family trips
to the Rose Bowl and Disneyland. Pruitt's security detachment is more
than three times as large as previous EPA Administrators, none of whom
had 24/7 protection. Many of the agents assigned to Pruitt's security
team are pulled from EPA's enforcement arm, leaving fewer agents to
actually investigate environmental crimes. But they do help him to get
to fancy Washington restaurants fast, using lights and sirens to
expedite Pruitt's travel to his dinner dates.
Pruitt has also fortified his office. He installed a $43,000 cone-of-
silence, supersecret phone booth. He had biometric locks installed on
his office doors and had his office swept for bugs--a no-bid job, by
the way, that went to a business partner of the guy who was then his
top security agent. The Agency even explored spending $70,000 on a
bulletproof desk for him.
All he is missing is the secret decoder ring.
The evidence that Pruitt cites to justify all of this security
spending, including business-class and first-class plane tickets he
claimed were required by security concerns, is remarkably thin. When he
testified last month before House appropriators, Pruitt claimed that it
was all justified by the Agency's inspector general. Well, on Monday,
Senator Carper and I heard directly from the inspector general, and the
story is not as Pruitt testified.
Pruitt wanted 24/7 security starting on his first day as
Administrator--not as a result of any threats and not because the
inspector general told him that round-the-clock security was justified.
The inspector general, in fact, never told him that. It is not the
inspector general's job. It looks like Administrator Pruitt misled two
House committees when he testified.
Let's move on to investigation No. 5, which involves an inspector
general inquiry into a possible violation of anti-lobbying rules. Once
you are on the Federal payroll exerting the responsibilities of
government, you are not supposed to engage in lobbying. During an April
2017 meeting with the National Mining Association, Pruitt encouraged
the group to press President Trump to withdraw from the Paris climate
accord. The GAO is also looking into improper lobbying activity after
he appeared in a lobbying organization's promotional video, opposing,
by the way, the clean water rule. That GAO investigation is
investigation No. 6.
Investigation No. 7 concerns an inspector general probe into Pruitt's
use of an obscure provision of the Safe Drinking Water Act to
circumvent the usual civil service process to hire and promote staff.
Pruitt used this loophole to hire lobbyists to oversee EPA functions
and to award huge raises to a couple of favorite political aides from
his Oklahoma days. He did this even after the White House had rejected
those proposed pay increases.
One of Pruitt's closest aides may not have even shown up to work for
3 months. Imagine that--not showing up to work for 3 months despite
drawing a nearly $180,000 salary. That is great work, if you can get
it. Incredibly--and I mean that literally--Pruitt testified to the
House that he didn't know whether this senior aide was coming to work
on not. You would think that after 3 months of not seeing this
individual at work, you might have a clue. Well, the EPA inspector
general can help the Administrator answer that question in the eighth
investigation on the list.
Now, every good swamp creature needs a swamp den, and Scott Pruitt
found himself just the place, paying $50 a night for a luxury Capitol
Hill condo co-owned by the wife of an energy lobbyist. Both the EPA's
inspector general and the House oversight committee are investigating
whether this below-market value housing arrangement constituted an
illicit gift. If you have lost track, these are investigations Nos. 9
and 10.
By the way, when the story broke about his swamp den, Pruitt denied
that this lobbyist lobbied EPA. Well, it turns out that Federal
lobbying disclosures and internal emails show that this lobbyist did in
fact lobby EPA, even meeting with Pruitt himself on behalf of an
industry client and also pushing Pruitt to name people favored by his
client to EPA science advisory boards.
That brings us to investigation No. 11. Pruitt has systemically
tilted EPA's science advisory committees toward his industry donors,
replacing academic scientists with industry-tied representatives. The
GAO is examining the role that Pruitt's political appointees played in
selecting industry-connected members to replace expert scientists on
science advisory boards.
Investigation No. 12 is unfolding back home in Oklahoma. The Oklahoma
Bar Association is looking into charges that Pruitt lied when he told
our Senate Environment and Public Works Committee during his
confirmation hearing last year that he had not conducted business using
private email addresses as Oklahoma's attorney general. Well, it turns
out that it looks like he did. Just last night, news broke that the EPA
inspector general is investigating Pruitt's use of private email
accounts, including questions of whether the Agency is properly
preserving records of the Administrator's private emails and including
those records in responses to Freedom of Information Act searches.
That makes the 13th investigation.
So there you have it--a baker's dozen so far of investigations into
Pruitt's conduct as EPA Administrator. Those are just the allegations
that have ramped up to the level of an official investigation. There
are scores of other scandals roiling the EPA. All you have to do is
pick up a newspaper, and you will be bombarded by stories of Pruitt's
truly swampy behavior. There are thousands of pages of communications
between Scott Pruitt and industry when he was attorney general of
Oklahoma that the current attorney general of Oklahoma is fighting to
prevent the public from seeing. There are millions of dollars of
political fundraising by Scott Pruitt from the fossil fuel industry
that he has never told us about. If he has withheld disclosures that
bear on his conflicts of interest, new investigations could result.
While Scott Pruitt dodges full disclosure of all his swampy industry
ties, he has let lobbyists and fossil fuel and chemical industry
operatives infiltrate throughout the EPA. The Associated Press found
that ``nearly half of the political appointees hired at the
Environmental Protection Agency under Trump have strong industry
ties.'' Pruitt rolled back an Obama rule controlling methane leaks
after he met with oil executives at the Trump hotel in Washington.
Pruitt halted environmental protections for an area in southwest Alaska
just hours after meeting with the mining executives looking to dig a
mine there. Pruitt's EPA protected an emissions rule loophole for a
trucking company shortly after Pruitt met with the company's
executives. It is government by ``I know a guy,'' with Pruitt as the
polluters' guy.
It is impossible not to notice the odor of self-dealing and
corruption emanating from the Scott Pruitt EPA. When I talk about
Pruitt with Rhode Islanders, they almost always ask me
[[Page S2715]]
the same questions: How does he still have a job? Why hasn't the
President fired this guy?
One answer goes back to the President himself. When Pruitt's scandals
started to snowball last month, oil and gas magnate Harold Hamm, a
billionaire patron of Scott Pruitt's, lobbied President Trump to keep
him on. Twenty-two polluter front groups, led by the infamous Heartland
Institute, so-called, wrote a letter to President Trump lauding
Pruitt's what they call ``positive record of reform unmatched by any of
Pruitt's predecessors.'' Who is behind those 22 polluter front groups?
Guess what. It is those climate denial champions, the Koch brothers, to
the tune of at least $87 million in funding.
The test in Trumptown is whether Harold Hamm and Charles and David
Koch are happy. And they are. Polluters are free to pollute for free,
and climate change gets scrubbed out of official communications. Big-
spending polluters are happy, happy, happy, and that is why Scott
Pruitt remains as EPA Administrator in the Trump swamp.
It doesn't have to be this way. The words of Woodrow Wilson are still
true today about legislative oversight. He said:
It is the proper duty of a representative body to look
diligently into every affair of government and to talk much
about what it sees. It is meant to be the eyes and the voice,
and to embody the wisdom and will of its constituents.
Our constituents--my constituents, anyway--are not just the big
polluters like Harold Hamm and the Koch brothers. The polluters may
have billions to spend in politics, which they do, but they have very
different interests than the millions of regular Americans who look to
EPA to protect the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the climate
we must inhabit. Where are the eyes and the voice in the present
majority for these millions of Americans? Our silence in the face of
this flagrant corruption is deafening.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Lee). The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
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