Scott Pruitt’s ethics problems are conservative ideology in action

Scott Pruitt is corrupt in ways that are practically too numerous to detail. He’s pushed to misuse agency funds on over-investing in his own personal security. He’s inappropriately demoted or reassigned career agency personnel who objected to his misuse of funds. He’s hired unqualified cronies for highly paid positions. And he’s accepted inappropriate gifts from lobbyists with business before the agency he leads. And conservatives are, overwhelmingly, okay with it.

As Sen. Mike Rounds (R-ID) said on Sunday’s Meet The Press, they aren’t even interested in the particulars of the accusations against Pruitt.

“I don’t know how much of it is overblown and how much of it is accurate, to be honest,” Rounds said. “I’m not going to call it fake news. I’ll say in some cases we’ll overblow something, but in this particular case Mr. Pruitt has been doing a good job as the secretary of the EPA. He is moving forward exactly as this president said he would.”

And Rounds is right — from the standpoint of mainstream conservative Republicans, Pruitt is doing a great job. Not despite his corruption, but because of it. Wasting resources and unjustly derailing professional staffers’ careers, even at some cost to his personal reputation and possible future career prospects, is exactly what conservatives want an Environmental Protection Agency administrator to do.

Under conservative rule, conduct in regulatory agencies is not a barnacle attached to the ship of state — it’s a core governing philosophy.

Conservatives don’t believe in the EPA’s mission

The basic problem conservatives have with the EPA is that it’s an agency whose mission is to regulate businesses in order to constrain their ability to pollute the air and water. And conservatives do not believe that regulating businesses in order to constrain their ability to pollute the air and water is a good idea.

As Henry Miller wrote in December 2016 for National Review, “Trump’s nominee for the EPA Administrator could — and should — abolish the agency.” The Heritage Foundation, more modestly, simply proposed something like a 30 percent cut in the agency’s budget, an idea echoed by the Trump administration’s budget proposals.

These ideas are, however, untenable in the face of public opinion. A Pew survey conducted the same December Miller called for EPA abolition found that 59 percent of Americans believe stricter environmental regulations are worth the cost. A more recent Gallup survey taken in late March of this year said 62 percent of the public thinks the government isn’t doing enough to protect the environment.

A savvy politician’s response to this is simply to lie, and thus Donald Trump has always maintained a distinction between climate change (Chinese hoax) and the basics of clean air and clean water that he says he supports.

In truth, however, while his administration has certainly tried to do less to stop greenhouse gas emissions it’s also zealously adhering to the Miller/Heritage concept of making all forms of pollution more prevalent.

One of the Pruitt era’s biggest regulatory decisions, for example, was a call to overrule EPA scientists and ignore recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics and refuse to ban the pesticide chlorpyrifos, which doctors and scientists say does significant damage to fetal brain development.

And in January, a memo indicated that the EPA intends to reinterpret a crucial Clean Air Act standard to allow many facilities to emit more of 189 different kinds of toxic air pollution.

Nevertheless, as Michael Grunwald recently detailed for Politico there are significant procedural hurdles to simply undoing existing environmental regulations because “the rulemaking process can take years of technical and administrative work that Pruitt and his team have not yet had time to do.”

The result is that “so far he’s only managed to delay a few rules that hadn’t yet taken effect.” That’s not for lack of trying, but it reflects the realities of the situation. What he can do is try to degrade the agency’s institutional capacity. And corruption is part and parcel of that endeavor.

Pruitt’s corruption fulfills conservative goals

Some of this is widely acknowledged. The inevitable to-be-sure paragraph of Grunwald’s article, for example, concedes that Pruitt has “sent a clear message throughout the agency to be more accommodating to businesses, a message that has helped persuade hundreds of its career public servants to retire.”

Pruitt’s unethical conduct — up to and including the habit of reassigning career staff who speak up about problems — works hand-in-hand with the overall strategy of attempting to demoralize the staff. Creating an agency culture where good work is not respected and where ethical service is punished is a good way of trying to persuade serious people to leave and ensure that staff positions will either go unfilled or will be held by time-servers with little zeal for the agency’s mission.

By the same token, while it’s politically impossible to directly cut the agency’s budget as steeply as conservatives would like, Pruitt can accomplish the same basic goals by wasting the money. Or, rather, by doing things — first class airfare, trips to Morocco, bringing a security detail to Disneyland, spending lavishly on office furniture — that seem like waste to people who believe in the EPA’s mission, Pruitt can fulfill the conservative movement’s mission of starving the EPA of the funds it needs to carry that mission out.

Of course, at some point, the sheer weight of embarrassment induced by Pruitt’s misconduct could make him more trouble than he’s worth. Similarly, it’s fear of political blowback that prevents Republicans from openly espousing the goal of completely eliminating the agency that he runs.

But last week’s Pruitt scandals are already somewhat in the rearview mirror thanks to FBI raids on Michael Cohen’s office, looming military conflict with Syria, and Mark Zuckerberg’s congressional testimony. If Pruitt can keep his head down and avoid any new problems for another week or so, a dozen new Trump administration controversies will already be upon us. (Remember Trump’s war on Amazon?)

Pruitt will be able to continue his low-intensity war on the EPA’s institutional culture and organizational capacity. Misuse of funds and abusive of personnel won’t be a distraction from his basic ideological mission there, they’ll be part and parcel of it.