A year ago, Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma was a joke. The former mayor of Tulsa was first elected to the Senate in 1994 and since then has built a reputation as an anti-scientific numbskull. From his perch at the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works from 2003 on, he has championed the idea that human-caused climate change is a conspiracy of “far left environmental extremists.”
He has compared environmental advocates to the Nazis. In his tendentious 2012 book—The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future—he pounded on this theme with an ample collection of disinformation, misinformation, misinterpretation, exaggeration, fabrication, and concoction spiced with insipid personal attacks on Al Gore. In the mid-winter of 2015, he infamously tossed a snowball on the Senate floor to supposedly prove global warming isn’t happening.
Inhofe is still a joke. But he’s the one doing the laughing these days. That’s because the “Inhofe Brigade”—as it’s called by Stephen Brown, the vice president for government affairs at Tesoro, a major oil refiner—has landed in high places at the Environmental Protection Agency. Julie Eilperin and Brady Dennis report:
Now the man critics once dismissed as a political outlier has an unprecedented opportunity to shape the nation’s energy and environmental policies. And he has helped populate the upper ranks of the agency he has derided with several of his closest confidants.
At least half a dozen former aides to Inhofe — and counting — have been hired into top positions at the EPA and the White House. The chief of staff and deputy chief of staff to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, a fellow Oklahoman and longtime friend of Inhofe, spent years working for the senator. Pruitt’s senior advisers on air, climate and legal issues are Inhofe alumni. In addition, two former Inhofe aides have become top domestic and international energy and environmental advisers to President Trump.
Even the Florida congressman who introduced a bill last month to terminate the EPA altogether knows it has a slim to nil chance of passage. But Pruitt and the Inhofe crew now working at the agency have a much better strategy in mind than outright extermination of the agency. Rather than eliminate it altogether, they are intent on turning it into a hollow shell.
By cutting its budget by 25 percent or more, rolling back climate-related and other regulations enacted under President Obama, and terrifying career employees, the minions of the Trump regime can undermine the EPA’s protections by lackadaisical enforcement of statutes like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. Thus does the nation wind up with an EPA that bolsters the agenda of Exxon-Mobil, the Koch Bros. and other polluters, while its foes can pretend to the public that it is still achieving what it was intended to achieve when it was launched nearly a half century ago.
Even when the Trump regime departs from the scene, it is likely to leave behind a gravely weakened EPA whose mission will take many years to revive. All part of Steve Bannon’s plan to deconstruct the administrative state. That is no joke.
