re: #98 makeitstop

He’s a saboteur who thinks the position is their for his enrichment and personal enjoyment to take advantage of the lights and sirens.

He’s a fucking disaster for the EPA and public health.

He has floated proposals that have not only ignored widely accepted and peer-reviewed science, they have been toxic to morale at the EPA. Last summer, for example, Pruitt-who for years has questioned established climate science-proposed a series of polarizing “red team/blue team” debates aimed at unraveling the public consensus, and years of hard work by EPA staff, on climate change.

Just last month, Pruitt vowed to enact new rules limiting what pseudoscientists like Steve Milloy have deceptively called “secret science.” On the surface, such a rule sounds like a good idea; who, in their right mind would want secret science? But in reality, this rule would mean that critical public health studies could no longer be used to inform EPA policy because some of the data are protected by doctor-patient or researcher-participant confidentiality.

Also last month, Priutt issued a series of talking points to agency staff instructing them to exaggerate uncertainties about the human causes of climate change. In effect, Pruitt is asking EPA staffers to lie.

As a result of these and other actions, career civil servants are leaving the agency in droves, further hastening EPA’s brain drain.