Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, who filed suit to block the Waters of the United States rule and who challenged the Obama administration on climate change, is President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to run the EPA. Before the transition team circulated word of the choice, Jason Miller, communications director for the transition, said Pruitt “led Oklahoma’s legal challenges to the EPA, Obamacare, executive actions on illegal immigration, Dodd-Frank and President Obama’s repeated attempts to bypass Congress.”
“Attorney General Pruitt has a strong conservative record as a state prosecutor and has demonstrated a familiarity with laws and regulations impacting a large energy resource state,” said Miller during a tele-conference. The New York Times said Pruitt was “one of a number of Republican attorneys general who have formed an alliance with some of the nation’s top energy producers to push back against the Obama regulatory agenda.”
Pruitt went to federal court in July 2015 to challenge the so-called WOTUS rule almost as soon as EPA issued it. Farm groups said the rule, which defines the upstream reach of clean water laws, was so broadly written it would cover dry ditches in farm fields. The EPA said the rule was patterned on regulations in effect during the Reagan era.
The largest U.S. farm group said Pruitt “should help provide a new degree of fairness for U.S. agriculture. We have been grateful for his effective legal work in response to EPA’s overreaching Waters of the United States rule. We anticipate that as EPA administrator, Pruitt will listen to our concerns and those of others who work with the nation’s natural resources on a daily basis,” said the American Farm Bureau Federation.
In his official biography, Pruitt says he is “a leading advocate against EPA’s activist agenda” and “is a national leader to restore the proper balance of power between the states and the federal government.”