What EPA chief Scott Pruitt promised — and what he’s done

...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. 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. 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 They show a significant increase in how often the agency has withdrawn or delayed regulations this year, along with a decrease in new regulations.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...more