[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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