Scott Pruitt Vaults Into First Place in Ongoing Trump Cabinet Grifting Olympics

Jay Willis
Updated
After his request for raises for two of his staffers was denied, the EPA administrator used a loophole in the Safe Drinking Water Act to get them the money anyway.

At the end of February, news broke that HUD secretary Ben Carson spent an astonishing $31,000 on a new dining room set for his office, a terrible story that he would later choose to make even worse by blaming the acquisition on his wife's expensive tastes. Most people saw Carson's Tablegate saga as a shameless new low in the annals of this White House's perpetual con on the American people. Not Scott Pruitt, though. Pruitt, the science-denying fossil fuels shill who currently serves as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, saw a challenge he couldn't pass up.

In early March, reports The Atlantic, Pruitt sought substantial pay raises for two young EPA staffers he had brought to Washington from the Oklahoma attorney general's office. When his request was summarily denied by the White House Presidential Personnel Office, Pruitt did what all lawyers who don't get their way do: He searched for a loophole until he found one.

A provision of the Safe Drinking Water Act allows the EPA administrator to hire up to 30 people into the agency, without White House or congressional approval. The provision, meant to help expedite the hiring of experts and allow for more flexible staffing, became law in 1996. In past administrations, it has been used to hire specialists into custom-made roles in especially stressed offices, according to Bob Perciasepe, a former acting EPA administrator.

After the White House rejected their request, Pruitt’s team studied the particulars of the Safe Drinking Water provision, according to the source with direct knowledge of these events. By reappointing [the staffers] under this authority, they learned, Pruitt could exercise total control over their contracts and grant the raises on his own.

Assuming you've grown accustomed by now to this brand of unchecked self-dealing within the Trump administration, you can't help but admire the brazenness of this stunt. Less than two weeks after receiving what amounted to an official proclamation from his superiors that there was no justification for the thing he wanted to do, Pruitt went out and found one himself. The Atlantic notes that Pruitt also used his Safe Drinking Water Act authority to hire a longtime chemical industry lobbyist as deputy head of the EPA's Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, a maneuver that conveniently allowed her to evade the ethics pledge that otherwise bars White House officials from working on issues for which they had lobbied in the previous two-year period. Again: Scott Pruitt is a bad person, but he is a really good lawyer.

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This is not the first instance of Pruitt treating his service to the country as an extended turn in one of those inflatable cash grab machines deployed by used car dealerships to lure customers to the lot. Last year, Pruitt rented a condominium in Washington from the wife of a prominent lobbyist for $50 a night, to be paid only on the nights he actually stayed in the unit—a wildly under-market rate that I would describe as "felony robbery," except for the fact that an energy company linked to the lobbyist happened to get its massive pipeline-expansion plan approved by Pruitt's EPA around the same time. (Pruitt, through a spokesperson, called this a coincidence.) The manm also spent six figures last year on first-class flights, which were necessary, he said, because he didn't appreciate the plebeians in coach class letting him know that he is terrible at his job.

Given the president's fondness for turnover and his distaste for the appearance of corruption within his administration—not actual corruption, mind you, but just the unfriendly headlines that tend to accompany public revelations thereof—you might think that Pruitt's recent shenanigans would put his job in jeopardy. Not so, says The Daily Beast.

President Donald Trump told Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt that “we’ve got your back” in a call Tuesday morning, two administration officials told the Associated Press. Trump also told Pruitt to “keep his head up” and said that the White House supported him, according to the report.

Of course it does. Grift recognize grift.