President Trump announced the resignation of scandal-plagued Scott Pruitt as EPA administrator on Thursday but said that the agency’s No. 2 official, Andrew Wheeler, “will continue with our great and lasting EPA agenda.” Pruitt was applauded by many in rural America for carrying out Trump’s promises of regulatory relief. But others assailed him for undermining the federal mandate to mix corn ethanol into the fuel supply for cars and pickup trucks.
Trump announced Pruitt’s departure on social media and said that Wheeler, formerly a coal industry lobbyist who had been serving as the EPA’s deputy administrator, would begin work on Monday as the agency’s interim leader. Trump gave no reason for Pruitt’s departure.
“I have accepted the resignation of Scott Pruitt as the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Within the Agency Scott has done an outstanding job, and I will always be thankful to him for this,” tweeted the president. “I have no doubt that Andy will continue on with our great and lasting EPA agenda. We have made tremendous progress and the future of the EPA is very bright!”
“It was beyond time for him to go,” said Sen. Jeff Merkley, Oregon Democrat, echoing a sentiment common among environmental groups and congressional critics, many of them Democrats, about Pruitt’s tenure at the EPA. “Over the coming weeks, we’ll learn who Donald Trump wants as Pruitt’s replacement. Knowing Trump’s desire to dismantle the EPA from the inside, the choice will probably be someone else totally unqualified, so our work is far from over.”
“Acting administrator Andrew Wheeler should abandon Pruitt’s toxic agenda and begin to repair the harm of his predecessor,” said green group Clean Water Action. “It may take a long time to repair the damage Pruitt caused, but this is our chance to fight for sensible leadership at EPA, demand a stop to the rollbacks, and make sure that polluters can no longer call the shots or get their way.”
Pruitt was tasked with keeping two of Trump’s campaign promises to rural America: regulatory relief and support for corn ethanol. Prominent among Pruitt’s actions was the withdrawal of the Waters of the United States rule issued by the Obama administration. Farm groups had fought the regulation, known by its abbreviation, WOTUS, as federal overreach that would extend regulations to even dry ditches. The largest U.S. farm group, the American Farm Bureau Federation, said it was confident that Wheeler “will continue the good work the agency has been doing on the Waters of the United States rule.”
Farm groups and ethanol makers were skeptical of Pruitt, the attorney general for Oklahoma, an oil state, even before his appointment to head the EPA. Pruitt had been a leader in efforts to restrict the RFS through a range of efforts, including proposals to cap the price of the credits, called RINs, that refiners must buy if they don’t mix enough ethanol into gasoline; suggestions that ethanol exports could count toward the RFS target for domestic use of biofuels; and secretive grants of “hardship” waivers to small-volume refineries that allowed them to avoid complying with the RFS.
“That sound you hear is a collective sigh of relief from the Midwest,” said Bob Dinneen of the Renewable Fuels Association, a trade group. “For the past year, Scott Pruitt had been waging war against the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), the biofuels industry, and the millions of farmers and rural Americans who helped Donald Trump get elected.”
“President Trump made the right decision,” said Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, a prominent supporter of corn ethanol. “Administrator Pruitt’s ethical scandals and his undermining of the president’s commitment to biofuels and Midwest farmers were distracting from the agency’s otherwise strong progress to free the nation of burdensome and harmful government regulations.”
Pruitt was lambasted for lavish spending on travel, assigning EPA employees to such tasks as searching for a high-paying job for his wife, and arranging to pay just $50 a night — well below the usual rate for Capitol Hill — to stay at a condo owned by an oil industry lobbyist. “The spendthrift EPA chief has been a political liability for the White House for months, drawing the attention of federal investigators with scandal after scandal, many of which were linked to his lavish spending of taxpayer money and the use of his position to enrich his family,” said the Los Angeles Times. “Pruitt leaves the post the target of more than a dozen official probes.”
In November, the EPA is due to announce the RFS for 2019. It has proposed a corn ethanol mandate of 15 billion gallons, the same as this year and the maximum allowed by a 2007 energy law. The biofuels industry faulted the proposal because it did not offset the impact that hardship waivers have on ethanol demand.
An oil industry spokesman said biofuels advocates were gloating unduly over Pruitt’s departure by linking it to their drive for approval of year-round sales of E-15, a 15 percent blend of ethanol into gasoline. “Can’t imagine this statement is going to go over well with the White House and other EPA officials” from oil states or wear well with oil state senators, said the spokesman, pointing to the Renewable Fuels Association’s statement that Pruitt had been “waging war against the RFS.”