Pruitt’s political career had been carefully nurtured in Oklahoma’s political culture. But when he arrived in Washington, it seemed that he wasn’t prepared for what awaited him. He was particularly unsuited to deal with criticism. In the spring of 2017, Pruitt attended a conference at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC, hosted by the Environmental Council of the States, or ECOS, a nonprofit group representing state-level environmental regulators. Two protestors attended the event. They were women, carrying baskets of oranges with stickers on them, highlighting the use of a pesticide called chlorpyrifos. Pruitt’s administration had recently allowed the pesticide’s continued use, even though it was shown to harm human health. The women shouted, and were led out of the conference hall. This was standard fare in Washington, where Senate hearings were often staffed by protestors in wait.
When he returned to EPA headquarters, however, Pruitt seemed deeply shaken by the women with the oranges. During a meeting in his office on an unrelated topic, Pruitt kept returning to the protestors and the threat they posed to him. He seemed to suggest that the conference organizers were complicit in letting the protestors in the building.
“He treated it as if he’d been shot at. He wouldn’t let it go . . . he was furious at the conference organizers for not protecting him,” recalled one person in the room. Pruitt often fixated on what he saw as threats to his safety, this person said. “He becomes obsessed. I think he truly believes that he is sort of on God’s mission, and people are out to get him.”
Pruitt’s new leadership team consisted largely of loyalists from Oklahoma. They barricaded themselves off from the rest of the agency and held hours-long meetings each morning without any EPA staff present. David Schnare attended those meetings, and he became frustrated with Pruitt’s refusal to meet with EPA staff. It was hindering Pruitt’s ability to understand the agency and to mobilize the people who worked there.
“Let’s put it this way. He didn’t want anyone to tell him that he couldn’t do something. He only wanted to be able to tell people to go do things and sometimes someone has to stand up and say you can’t do that. And those people didn’t last,” Schnare said.
There were other problems with Pruitt. Schnare began to doubt that Pruitt, for all his close ties to energy companies, might be a reliable conduit for the effort to thoroughly dismantle the legal basis for climate change regulation. Schnare discussed the transition plan with Pruitt, and explained the importance of attacking climate rules. But Pruitt seemed uninterested. Instead, Pruitt asked his staff to come up with quick initiatives that could garner headlines and give him a chance to visit states for public events.
“If he had an agenda, the agenda was: promote Scott Pruitt for the next job,” Schnare said. “He looked for opportunities that gave him the chance to go out into the states—especially Iowa and New Hampshire.”
Schnare quit the EPA that spring. Pruitt’s inner circle became tighter. The morning meetings went long—three hours sometimes—and Pruitt’s team began issuing policy proposals that were fully formed, without any input from the EPA’s staff. In the course of a year, Pruitt’s team issued orders to repeal or roll back forty-six rules and regulations. Many of these were major rules. Pruitt’s team issued a proposal to repeal the Clean Power Plan and to strip away the CAFE standards for fuel efficiency.
In June, Pruitt attended a ceremony at the White House Rose Garden, where he introduced President Trump. The event was to announce America’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord agreement to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. It was the third global treaty to combat climate change abandoned by the United States. Pruitt was a vocal proponent of the withdrawal, and his argument won out over officials who believed that international obligations should be honored from administration to administration.
The withdrawal was characteristic of the Trump administration’s approach to governing and conformed with Charles Koch’s views. Trump and his advisors considered the Washington bureaucracy to be a parasitic population, feeding off the American economy. To combat these parasites, the administration left jobs unfilled, transferred career employees considered disloyal into dead-end jobs, and failed to appoint staff members to the one review board that considered employee complaints. This slow corrosion of the civil service melded smoothly with Charles Koch’s goals. There would be no harm in letting the administrative state recede.
Still, it wasn’t clear how effective Pruitt was in his effort to dismantle, or permanently hobble, the EPA. His efforts to repeal the Clean Power Plan and other measures would face legal challenges. Pruitt also seemed to be stalling on the tedious and time-consuming work of chopping up the EPA’s functions and delegating them to other agencies, as Schnare had suggested. Finally, Pruitt became fatally distracted—by mid-2018, he was the focus of eleven federal investigations for his spending on security and relationships with lobbyists. He asked one of his staffers, for example, to reach out to Chick-fil-A to win Pruitt’s wife a franchise location.
In July of 2018, Pruitt resigned. He was temporarily replaced by his deputy, Andrew Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist. In certain circles, there was hope that Wheeler would be more focused and more disciplined in carrying forward some of the goals outlined in Schnare’s transition plan.
Even within the chaos of Pruitt’s tenure, he achieved important victories for Koch Industries. The effort to regulate greenhouse gas emissions had been purged from the EPA, at least temporarily, pushing back the date when carbon emission limits might harm Koch’s oil refining and trading operations.
The Trump administration also did something that seemed impossible—it politicized the issue of climate change even further than it had been in 2010. It seemed inconceivable, in the Trump era, that any Republican or conservative Democrat could even broach the topic of combating climate change. The real-world effects were measurable. When George W. Bush was elected president, atmospheric concentrations of carbon were 375 parts per million, far exceeding the record level of human history. When Barack Obama pushed for the cap-and-trade bill in 2010, carbon dioxide levels were 393 parts per million. In 2018, the concentrations reached 410 parts per million, a new record.
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In late 2017, Charles Koch’s political network released a memo to its donors. The memo touted two big achievements that year. The first was the “comprehensive tax reform bill,” which the memo said was the network’s top priority. The second was the regulatory rollback administered by cabinet members like Scott Pruitt, including the proposed repeal of the Clean Power Plan and the withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord.
The Koch network couldn’t claim credit for these accomplishments. The group had shaped the Trump agenda but had not written it. The balance of power between the Trump administration and the Koch network was still uncertain. Koch claimed some victories, but it was clear that Donald Trump was determined to go his own way. Trump abandoned a major trade deal in Asia and imposed tariffs on goods from Europe and China, policies that Charles Koch vehemently opposed.
Inside the Trump administration, there was disdain for Charles Koch because he was considered too ideological, inflexible, and out of touch with American voters. Trump’s influential policy advisor, Steve Bannon, made this disdain public during an interview with the New York Times Magazine, published in March of 2017. Bannon, indirectly praising Donald Trump’s brilliance, disparaged the Democratic Party. Then he took a shot directly at Charles Koch: “And then the Republicans, it’s all this theoretical Cato Institute, Austrian economics, limited government—which just doesn’t have any depth to it. They’re not living in the real world.”