Contributors

Tuesday, April 03, 2018

Pruitt Next to Be Axed?

In the dumpster fire of the Trump administration the question is never whether someone is going to be fired. It's when.

This week's candidate is Scott Pruitt, the EPA administrator. Pruitt has a long list of reasons for being fired.

It started out with his extravagant spending on travel, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on private planes for useless junkets, then traveling first class instead of coach (because he didn't want to have to deal with people who despise his destruction of the EPA and the environment). Pruitt built a $43,000 soundproof booth in his office so EPA employees couldn't overhear him plotting with oil company executives. Oh, and Pruitt also had his security detail also fly first class.

Last week it was discovered that Pruitt was paying only $50 a night to stay in a tony DC condo, which happened to belong to the wife of a lobbyist. Then the EPA approved a pipeline that the lobbyist was pushing.

Today's news is that Pruitt went around the White House to give raises to two young female cronies from Oklahoma, increasing their salaries to $164,200 and $114,590. These were political appointees, so the White House has to okay any raises. The White House rejected the raises, so Pruitt used the Safe Water Drinking Act to give his girlfriends 53% and 33% raises.

The cheap rent/pipeline approval certainly looks like a quid pro quo, an overt example of corruption. One might argue that it was just a coincidence. But Pruitt's long history of extravagant spending and disregard for the EPA's mission suggest a pattern of corruption.



From the top down, the Trump administration is clearly the most corrupt in at least a century, and probably all of history.

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