Despite Employee Campaign Against Him, Pruitt Elected To Lead EPA

Some of the U.S. EPA’s own employees contacted their senators last month in an effort to get them to vote against the confirmation of President’s Trump controversial nominee Scott Pruitt.

The campaign was unsuccessful as Pruitt was confirmed officially. He currently faces disapproval not only from the opposing party and the EPA’s own employees, but environmental groups as well.

As The New York Times reported, Nicole Cantello, a lawyer for the EPA, said that “It seems like Trump and Pruitt want a complete reversal of what E.P.A. has done. I don’t know if there’s any other agency that’s been so reviled. So it’s in our interests to do this.”

During the campaign, the employee union had sent emails and posted messages through social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter.

In his role as Oklahoma’s attorney general, The Washington Post reported that Pruitt “regularly huddled with fossil fuel firms and electric utilities about how to combat federal environmental regulations and spoke to conservative political groups about what they called government ‘overreach,’ according to thousands of pages of emails made public.”

The emails demonstrated a partnership between Pruitt’s office and the fossil fuel industry, “with frequent meetings, calls, dinners and other events,” Nick Surgey, research director for the Center for Media and Democracy, told the Post.

According to the Post, “the emails show that Pruitt and his office were in touch with a network of conservative groups, many of which in the past have received backing from billionaire brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch, the libertarian owners of Koch Industries, a major oil company.”

The Times reported that before the final vote, democratic senators Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, said that they would vote in favor of Pruitt’s confirmation. There was only one republican, Susan Collins of Maine, who had said that she would oppose the confirmation.

“We know that he’ll dismantle Clean Power Plan and the Waters of the U.S. rule, but he’s not going to go in there and start firing people,” Jeffrey Holmstead, an EPA Official from the George W. Bush administration told the Times.

Cantello said that most of her career at the EPA had been focused on water protection, particularly on cleaning pollution in the Great Lakes.

“I’m afraid all the work I’ve done will be abandoned,” she told the Times.