So Schnare came up with a plan to get rid of it. He estimated that the entire agency could be cut up into component parts and its functions handed over to other agencies or abandoned altogether. This could be completed by the sixth year of the Trump administration. It couldn’t happen fast, but it could happen.
The beachhead team moved into the north building of the EPA headquarters, a stately, stone office building built during the New Deal era, just south of the White House off Pennsylvania Avenue. The building was shaped in a semicircle, embracing a stone courtyard full of picnic tables where office workers with lanyards around their necks ate lunch while packs of sightseers walked past, many of them, in the early winter of 2017, wearing red “Make America Great Again” baseball hats. Inside the front door, the EPA lobby was majestic and full of echoes, like a giant bank lobby, with marble floors and stone walls and hallways with vaulted ceilings. A large spiral staircase, with bannisters of wrought iron emblazoned with ornate designs, led from the lobby up to the third floor, which housed the agency’s executive offices.
David Schnare’s office was on this floor, near the administrator’s office. This was where he worked on the detailed transition plan. Schnare’s plan was revealing in what it emphasized. The EPA imposed burdens on American businesses both large and small. Its many rules affected farmers, small business owners, and midsized manufacturers, and all of them complained about regulations over dust pollution, cleanup efforts at Superfund sites, and other matters. But the Trump team’s priority was not attacking or changing these rules. The priority was focused, almost entirely, on rules that were a burden for the fossil fuel industry.
A copy of Schnare’s forty-seven-page transition plan, entitled “Agency Action Plan,” began with an overview of the agency. The next heading was “Priority Change Initiatives.” The first priority for change read: “STOP. Obama climate agenda, including Clear Act greenhouse gas regulations for new (NSPS) and existing (ESPS, or the “Clean Power” Plan) coal and natural gas power plants, CAFE Standards, Methane rules and others.” These priorities could accurately be called Koch Industries’ top priorities. The CAFE standards, for example, referred to the federal fuel efficiency mandates that reduced demand for gasoline. The Clean Power Plan was the closest thing to carbon regulation that the Obama administration had been able to achieve.
The plan then listed a timeline for change. The first item on the timeline read: “Day One—Issue directives to comply with Executive Orders to rescind climate change directives, including greenhouse gas emissions rules for new and existing power plants, suspend for review (withdraw from OMB) all major final rules that have not been published. . . .” The focus on eliminating climate change rules came from a simple source—Donald Trump’s campaign speeches. “Myron Ebell always said, ‘Go look at the president’s speeches and the president’s website . . . that’s the basis for what we put together in the transition plan,” Schnare recalled.
It is difficult to pinpoint the source of Donald Trump’s driving fixation with fighting climate change regulation. The fixation was apparent in his campaign speeches, and then in his administration’s actions across virtually every federal department. From the USDA to the Departments of Energy and Interior and the EPA, a mandate was handed down to roll back climate change efforts.
One plausible explanation of Trump’s fixation was that he responded to the political realities of the modern Republican voting base. If Trump had a genius, it was the genius of reading a crowd and telling people what they wanted to hear, even before they knew they wanted to hear it. He had a sensitive radar for applause lines, and he built on the lines that worked the best. In this way, Trump’s focus on denying the reality of climate change could be seen as an echo of Koch Industries’ years of work to politicize the issue by casting doubt on the science and portraying carbon emission rules as a government conspiracy against liberty. The politics that Koch stoked in 2010 became the policies that Trump enacted in 2017.
The new EPA administrator would carry out these policies. To fill that role, Trump selected Scott Pruitt, the attorney general of Oklahoma, where oil interests dominated the political landscape. A number of Koch funded groups signed an open letter to US Senators, urging that they confirm Pruitt. Pruitt won confirmation with a vote of 52 to 46. Only one Republican senator, Susan Collins of Maine, voted against him.V
Pruitt arrived for work in the spring of 2017. One of the first people Pruitt met when he arrived at EPA headquarters was David Schnare. “I met him at the door,” Schnare said. “I handed him a book, which contained all the statutes that EPA has to implement. It’s about three, three and a half, inches thick. And I said: ‘Welcome aboard, sir, here’s the operating manual.’ ”
The gift was more than a good-hearted joke. It was also a warning. Schnare knew Pruitt’s job was to dismantle the EPA. But dismantling the agency wouldn’t be as easy as Trump might have suggested on the campaign trail.
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Almost immediately after he arrived in his new office at EPA headquarters, Scott Pruitt apparently became convinced that a lot of people inside and outside the building wanted to kill him.
He requested that a security guard be posted outside his office door, behind a bulletproof desk. The desk would presumably act as a barricade if someone came in the office shooting. Pruitt also requested a bulletproof SUV for his personal transport, complete with bulletproof seats. He dramatically expanded the size of his security detail, building a team that could protect him around the clock. He swept the administrator’s office for listening devices and ordered the EPA security department to build a soundproof booth inside his office, where he could make phone calls outside the hearing of career EPA staffers, at a cost to taxpayers of $43,000.
It was common for new EPA administrators to hold town hall meetings with the career EPA staff to meet the team and lay out priorities. But Pruitt rarely interacted with any staff members, including senior staffers. He became something of a curious figure inside the EPA. He rarely saw the staffers, rarely talked to them, and when he did pass employees in the hallway, the effect was sometimes off-putting. He said hello, cheerfully, and quoted Bible scripture without solicitation or apparent relevance to the situation. In one instance, Pruitt recited a long quote about toiling in the fields, which left staffers wondering what he meant. Two staffers suspected the quote was from the Old Testament, but they weren’t brushed up on their Scripture and couldn’t confirm it. One day, word raced through the office that Pruitt was making a rare public appearance and standing by a bank of elevators, handing long-stemmed roses to women as they arrived for work, for reasons that were unclear.
While Pruitt’s personality was a puzzle, his policy stances were well known. When he became attorney general of Oklahoma, Pruitt was extraordinarily close to the state’s fossil fuel companies. In 2011, lawyers with Devon Energy drafted a letter complaining to the EPA about air pollution regulations. Pruitt pasted the letter onto an official state document with the official seal of the state’s attorney general and sent it to the EPA. After Pruitt sent the letter, a Devon lobbyist named William F. Whitsitt sent Pruitt an e-mail that said: “Outstanding!” Devon Energy’s involvement in sending the letter was not made public until 2014, when it was uncovered by New York Times reporter Eric Lipton. This was one example among many.