The head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is disputing accusations that he spends too much time in Oklahoma and charges taxpayers for his travel there.
Scott Pruitt, who has lived in Oklahoma for much of his life and was most recently its attorney general, said groups making those accusations are wrong. He blamed former Obama administration employees driven by their opposition to him for the claims.
Pruitt defended himself Thursday while in Oklahoma to speak with agricultural interests about his efforts to roll back former President Barack Obama’s Clean Water Rule.
{mosads}“The folks talking about this, one, their facts are wrong, and that’s not a surprise. But it’s an alt-EPA,” he told Oklahoma City television station Fox 25, referring to the social media identity of an anti-Trump group that claims to be EPA employees.
“It’s a group of employees that worked for Obama, that formed an organization to put out these kinds of things that are not accurate and completely forthcoming as far as those issues,” Pruitt continued.
In a Monday report based on agency documents, the Environmental Integrity Project said that through the end of May Pruitt has spent half of his tenure in Oklahoma.
The environmental group said the EPA paid at least $12,000 for the airfare for those trips, since they often included at least some official responsibilities, after which Pruitt went home to Tulsa.
Pruitt was in Oklahoma for about 90 percent of the days that he traveled, the group said.
On Thursday, liberal watchdog group American Integrity asked the federal Office of Special Counsel to investigate whether Pruitt’s use of taxpayer funds for the trips was illegal. That group is led by former Obama administration employees.
EPA spokeswoman Amy Graham defended Pruitt, saying he properly gets reimbursed for official business and that he was working on all of the trips.
Graham also said that the original report about Pruitt’s travel unfairly inflated the number of days he was in his home state.
“The inconvenient truth is that radical environmentalists are counting weekends, Mondays and Fridays spent in Washington, and holidays like Easter Sunday in their opposition research in an effort to distract from the administrator’s significant accomplishments, including more than 30 regulatory actions, review of the Clean Power Plan, and rewriting the definition of a ‘water of the U.S.’”