30-Year EPA Veteran Talks Of "Utter Contempt" Pruitt Had For Scientific Experts & Career Staffers
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Elizabeth Southerland had a distinguished, 30-year career at the the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency during which she held numerous senior positions, including director of science and technology in the Office of Water. So she had a front-row seat early last year as Trump’s EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, took power with an unwavering mission: To undo virtually every environmental achievement of the Obama administration, to slash the agency’s staff, and to give industry unprecedented power over the nation’s environmental rules.
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e360: As you mentioned, the day you retired you released a statement criticizing the Trump administration’s running of the EPA, including its requirement that any new regulation be accompanied by the repeal of two existing ones. You also criticized the proposed rollback of many existing rules. You wrote in that statement: “Today, the environmental field is suffering from the temporary triumph of myth over truth.” Tell me more about that.
Southerland: What I perceived is that the new administration came into the EPA with complete contempt for the career staff in the agency. Not once did they talk to any of us about all these rules that they’ve been requested by industry to repeal. And instead, Scott Pruitt met solely with industry representatives and again, just as they did in the case of the coal-fired power plant rule that I worked on, in every case, they met solely with industry representatives and then announced to staff that they were going to reconsider and delay all these rules that have been years of in the making. So it was the complete and utter contempt for the career staff and the further commitment to do whatever industry asked them to do without question.
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e360: Following the release of your statement, the EPA press office issued a statement of its own to reporters in which your retirement benefit was grossly inflated. The organization, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, filed a lawsuit on your behalf to obtain EPA internal communications regarding how to counterpunch. Those emails were released in July. What did they reveal?
Southerland: It was an amazing, though heavily redacted, pile of emails that we finally got to see. Again, under the Freedom of Information Act and the Privacy Act, I should have been allowed to get those emails immediately. But the agency continued to stall and stall, so we actually had to file a lawsuit to get what was our right to receive months earlier. And what we found from the heavily redacted emails is that the day my retirement speech was released to the public through the Washington Post article and through an Internet posting by the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, the entire political appointee press office engaged in an effort to devise a counter attack to discredit me.
And what they came up with is two false statements that they then contacted multiple right-wing media and had them publish. And the two false statements were, number one, that all federal employees, after only 20 years of work, receive their full salary for the rest of their lives. So number one that’s not true. And number two, they selected the one year in which my salary was amplified by a Presidential Distinguished Rank Award. Now that’s an award that less than one percent of any of the senior executives in all of government ever receive. So that award is 35 percent of your salary. They took that award, added it to my base salary and then maintained that that was the salary I was receiving for the rest of my life after having retired from EPA. Again, two false statements, but it was done to really build up this sense of outrage and contempt towards me and towards all federal employees.
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https://e360.yale.edu/features/an-inside-look-at-how-trump-turned-the-epa-into-an-industry-subsidiary
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