Scott Pruitt, the Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), is loathed by most researchers and environmentalists, but he may yet emerge as science’s unlikely redeemer.
Pruitt is one of the least popular people in America. Before coming to DC, he was the attorney general of Oklahoma, where he described himself as “a leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda,”— a claim he made good by suing the Agency no fewer than 14 times.
But Pruitt — who in public appears reasonable, quietly‐spoken and polite — denies having declared war on the environment, only on the EPA’s scientific protocols. The 1970 Clean Air Act requires the agency, when proposing new regulations, use criteria that “accurately reflect the latest scientific knowledge.”
Governmental skepticism of science has a long pedigree. On launching Medicare on June 15, 1966, LBJ berated the National Institutes of Health for having published lots of papers without their having benefited any patients. Earlier, in his Farewell Address, Eisenhower warned of US public policy becoming “the captive of a scientific‐technological elite.” Now Pruitt maintains that skeptical tradition by challenging the EPA’s science—and by extension, much of the way research is performed in the U.S. today.