EPA Chief Scott Pruitt Resigns After String of Scandals
*By Alisha Haridasani*
Scott Pruitt, the embattled chief of the Environmental Protection Agency, resigned Thursday afternoon, following months of scandals about his spending practices and a trail of questions about possible ethical violations.
“I have accepted the resignation of Scott Pruitt,” President Trump tweeted on Thursday. “Within the Agency Scott has done an outstanding job, and I will always be thankful to him for this.”
In remarks to reporters aboard Air Force One Thursday, Trump said the decision to resign was Pruitt's alone. "He felt that he did not want to be a distraction for an administration that he has a lot of faith in," Trump said.
Pruitt’s deputy, Andrew Wheeler, will be the new acting chief of the EPA, who the president described as "a very environmental person."
Pruitt’s deputy, Andrew Wheeler, will be the new acting chief of the EPA, the president said.
In the resignation letter that Pruitt sent to President Trump, he said "it is extremely difficult for me to cease serving you in this role."
But he then said, "the unrelenting attacks on me personally, my family, are unprecedented and have taken a sizable toll on all of us."
Pruitt has been accused of a [seemingly unending list](https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/06/politics/scott-pruitt-controversies-list/index.html) of offenses, including misusing taxpayer money to fly home on a private jet, enlisting his aides to help his wife find a job or find a particular moisturizer, renting out a condo ー at a discount ー from a health care lobbyist, and installing a $43,000 sound-proof phone booth in his office.
Despite his scandal-ridden tenure, his resignation came as a surprise to many in Washington because just a day prior to the announcement, Pruitt celebrated the July 4th holiday at the White House.
Pruitt, a former Oklahoma attorney general, made a name for himself by suing the very agency he would end up leading, urging the EPA to roll back regulations. That stance, which pleased many Republicans, is the reason he managed to cling on to his job for over a year despite the scandals, said Phil Wegmann, writer at the Washington Examiner.
"He was doing a good job of deregulation, of beating back a lot of the policies of the Obama administration had put in place," he said.
"If you filter out all of the personal scandals, he's not doing a bad job in the eyes of this administration."
But the fact that the ethical scandals eventually caught up to him signals that there is a limit to how much conservatives were willing to ignore, said Wegmann.
"Eventually it was just too much and he got the boot."
His replacement, a former coal lobbyist who is likely to pursue the same regulatory rollback agenda as Pruitt, may not clean up the EPA's act and instead might find himself involved with "corporate cronyism," said Wegmann.
"This is like replacing the fox in the hen house with a wolf in the hen house."
For the full segment, [click here.](https://cheddar.com/videos/epa-chief-scott-pruitt-resigns)
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