Scott Pruitt Keeps Taking Credit For Obamas Work

This story was produced and originally published by The New Republic and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Last year, Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, embarked on a media tour to convince the public that President Barack Obama was bad for the environment. In interviews with “Fox and Friends ”; conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt ; the Washington Examiner ; and conservative radio stations  in Texas and North Dakota , Pruitt said the “environmental left” wrongly characterized Obama as an “environmental savior.”

“Superfund sites, we have more today than when President Obama came into office,” he said in one interview from May . “Water infrastructure, you had Flint and you had Gold King. The regulations that they issued on carbon, they failed twice. They struck out twice. So when you look at their record, what exactly did they accomplish for the environment that folks are so excited about?”

Today, however, the person who appears most excited about Obama’s environmental accomplishments is Pruitt, as he keeps mistaking Obama’s victories for his own.

The latest instance  occurred during Pruitt’s double-header of congressional hearings last week. In his opening remarks  to the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s subcommittee on environment, Pruitt touted his agency’s efforts to clean up Superfund sites, the most contaminated industrial sites in the country. “We have removed over three times the number of polluted sites of contaminated communities across the country as compared to the previous administration for 2017,” he said.

An Associated Press fact-check  found that statement to be accurate, but misleading. “The EPA declared seven cleanups complete from its Superfund priority list last year, compared with two sites delisted the year before,” the report read. “But records show that construction work at all seven sites cited by Pruitt’s EPA, such as removing soil or drilling wells to suck out contaminated groundwater, was completed years before Pruitt was confirmed as the agency’s chief in February. Removing sites from the list is a procedural step that occurs after monitoring data show that remaining levels of harmful contaminates meet cleanup targets, which were often set by the EPA decades ago.”

In other words, Pruitt’s EPA didn’t have to do any actual decontamination work to “remove” these contaminated sites. Obama’s EPA had already done that work.

Pruitt has been widely criticized for implementing a policy agenda that benefits polluters at the expense of public health, a criticism repeated by Democrats in last week’s hearings. In claiming he’s decontaminated a record number of Superfund sites, though, Pruitt is trying to portray himself as an effective environmental regulator—all while continuing his push to deregulate the fossil fuel and chemical industries.

Pruitt’s hypocrisy is apparent in other successes he’s claimed, like cleaning up lead in drinking water. In March of last year, he announced that the EPA had awarded a $100 million grant  to the city of Flint, Michigan, to address its lead-contaminated drinking water system. “The people of Flint and all Americans deserve a more responsive federal government,” Pruitt said in a statement. His EPA has also cited this grant as part of correcting “the previous administration’s mistakes.”

But the $100 million grant to Flint was initially approved  by Congress in December 2016, and signed into law by Obama. Pruitt’s EPA wasn’t responsible for the bulk of the work of that proposal; the agency simply had to “review and approve a formal request from state officials detailing how the city intends to use the grant money,” according to The Detroit News .