Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt’s TIME 100 profile is very different from most featured on the website. Not only is it negative, it was written by a vocal critic.
Pruitt’s profile was written by former EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman. Whitman wrote that “under the administration of Scott Pruitt, the agency is experiencing a new wave of policymaking—or rather, policy dismantling.”
“If his actions continue in the same direction, during Pruitt’s term at the EPA the environment will be threatened instead of protected, and human health endangered instead of preserved, all with no long-term benefit to the economy,” Whitman wrote.
Whitman served as EPA administrator in the Bush administration and as New Jersey’s governor before that. She’s a vocal opponent of the Trump administration, and even endorsed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
Whitman opposed Pruitt’s nomination to head the EPA back in late 2016, chiding his “seeming disdain for the people at the agency, for science.”
“He is very definitely a denier of climate change, something that scientists, by and large, overwhelmingly, say is occurring and that humans have a role to play in that,” Whitman told NPR in December 2016.
“He also seems to be someone who doesn’t believe in regulation. And that’s a time where you want to say regulations are prevention. They’re trying to protect us,” she said.
Whitman made similar remarks in an interview with TIME given a few weeks later, saying she was “nervous” about Pruitt taking the reins at EPA.
What made Pruitt’s TIME 100 profile interesting is that other prominent Republicans, including President Donald Trump himself, had theirs written by friends or allies. Pruitt’s was written by a vocal critic.
For example, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz wrote Trump’s TIME 100 profile, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wrote Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ profile. Fox News host Sean Hannity’s profile was written by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a regular guest on his show.
On the other side of the aisle, Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards wrote a glowing TIME 100 profile for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat.
Richards wrote that Pelosi is “a voice for the people who are counting on government to be there for them.” Planned Parenthood has donated to Pelosi’s congressional campaigns.
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