In this Feb. 12, 2018, file photo, former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt attends a meeting with state and local officials and former President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington.
Carolyn Kaster/AP
- Former EPA chief Scott Pruitt has filed to run for a soon-to-be-vacant Senate seat in Oklahoma.
- Pruitt was the head of the EPA for seven months under the Trump administration.
- During his time there, he faced scrutiny for questionable spending and rollbacks of various environmental protections.
Scott Pruitt, the former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under former President Donald Trump, has filed to run for a US Senate seat in Oklahoma.
Sen. Jim Inhofe, 87, said he will retire and vacate the seat next year.
Pruitt filed on Friday to campaign for Inhofe’s seat. Pruitt served two terms as Oklahoma’s attorney general. Prior to that, he was a legislator with the Oklahoma Senate for two terms.
As the EPA head, Pruitt held the appointment for seven months before resigning in 2018 amid a string of scandals, as Insider’s Kevin Loria reported.
Several decisions he made as EPA administrator also attracted the attention of federal investigators. He, for example, earned scrutiny for installing a$43,000 secure phone booth in his office without conferring with federal lawmakers. A federal watchdog determined that Pruitt violated spending laws by doing so.
The watchdog also found that Pruitt spent millions on a 24-hour security detail that was more than triple the size of security details for previous EPA administrators.
He also put in requests for a $100,000-per-month private jet membership, a bulletproof vehicle, and $70,000 spending money for office furniture that included a bulletproof desk, all of which were denied.
Aside from ethics scandals, Pruitt presided over a series of rapid, widespread rollbacks of protections designed to support human and environmental health. He also had a history of showing favoritism to the fossil fuel industry.
He tried to repeal the Clean Power Plan, a policy put in place by the Obama administration requiring power plants to cap their greenhouse gas emissions. He also backed the rollback of the Clean Water Rule, which barred industries from dumping various pollutants into streams and wetlands.
Additionally, he encouraged Trump to withdraw from the historic Paris Climate Agreement, an international treaty adopted in 2015 that pushed for significant cuts to greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.
Insider’s Kevin Loria contributed to this report.
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