Trump Cabinet Member’s Latest Scandal: Installing a $25,000 Secure Phone Booth in His Office

Has a SCIF Just Floors Away

Taxpayers are about to get a bill for $24,570 to install a secure phone booth in the office of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. It is the latest scandal Pruitt is facing. The secure phone booth, similar to what is known as a SCIF – Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, pronounced, “skiff” – is needed, the EPA chief’s spokesperson says, and “a number, if not all, Cabinet offices have” them.  

But as The Washington Post, which reports on the latest big ticket item Pruitt is spending taxpayer funds on, notes, the EPA already has a SCIF, just not in Scott Pruitt’s office. 

The Post says, “according to former agency employees, the EPA has long maintained a SCIF on a separate floor from the administrator’s office, where officials with proper clearances can go to share information classified as secret.”

Pruitt, the Post says, now shies away from using email, after his emails when he was the attorney general of Oklahoma revealed he was in bed with the oil and gas industry. In one infamous scandal, Pruitt literally copied and pasted the text from an oil company’s letter onto his official Oklahoma attorney general letterhead, and sent it off to Congress. 

Pruitt is a climate change denier. He opposes the right to abortion, he opposes environmental regulations, same-sex marriage, and ObamaCare. Pruitt supports so-called religious freedom laws.

What other scandals is the EPA Administrator looking at?

The EPA’s Office of Inspector General is investigating Pruitt’s frequent travels to his home state of Oklahoma, where he is expected to run for the U.S. Senate. Those flights were paid for by taxpayers.

Pruitt, like many in the Trump administration, has been using a private email account, too.

In July, the Chicago Sun-Times Editorial Board wrote, “Scott Pruitt’s short tenure as EPA chief already a scandal.”

In his five months on the job, Pruitt has tried to block, delay or entirely uproot more than 30 environmental regulations. He is shredding the Clean Power Plan, designed to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. He wants to revoke plans to reduce pollution in waterways. He has ended a ban on a pesticide the EPA had found was dangerous to children. He has delayed a rule to stop chemical plant explosions and spills. He has become Donald Trump’s point man in undermining America’s compliance with the Paris climate change accord and wants to gum up the works by starting a debate on whether human-caused climate change is real.

As for going after any new threats to the environment? Not a chance.

The EPA is not a Cabinet agency but the Administrator has Cabinet-level rank.

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Image by Lorie Shaull via Flickr and a CC license

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