EPA chief Scott Pruitt says the agency will no longer settle lawsuits with environmental groups behind closed doors, arguing that the Obama administration regularly excluded industry and state governments from those conversations while pandering to green activists.
Pruitt, “who sued the agency he now runs more than a dozen times in his former job as attorney general of oil producing Oklahoma, has long railed against the so-called practice of ‘sue and settle,'” says Reuters.
The majority of lawsuits against EPA are intended to speed up the implementation of regulations. Speaking from an organization that frequently sues EPA for exactly that purpose, John Walke, director of the Clean Air Project at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a statement, “Pruitt’s doing nothing more than posturing about a non-existent problem and political fiction. His targeting of legal settlements, especially where EPA has no defense to breaking the law, will just allow violations to persist, along with harms to Americans.”
Many conservatives, though, are pleased at Pruitt’s actions. “Daren Bakst, a research fellow in agricultural policy at the Heritage Foundation think tank, said sue and settle has led to ‘egregious antics’ that have ‘effectively handed over the setting of agency priorities to environmental pressure groups,’ and has led to rushed rulemaking by the agency,” according to Reuters.