Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt has met regularly with corporate executives from the automobile, mining and fossil fuel industries — in several instances shortly before making decisions favorable to those interest groups, according to a copy of his schedule obtained by The Washington Post.
There were, by comparison, only two environmental groups and one public health group on the schedule, which covers the months of April through early September.
It is the first time Pruitt’s schedule has been made public and it adds to understanding about how he makes decisions.
On the morning of May 1, Pruitt met at EPA headquarters with the Pebble Limited Partnership, a Canadian firm that had been blocked by the agency in 2014 from building a massive gold, copper and molybdenum mine in Alaska’s Bristol Bay watershed.
That afternoon, he met with Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who also opposed the Obama administration’s decision to invoke a provision of the Clean Water Act to block the mine, on the grounds that contamination could jeopardize the region’s valuable sockeye salmon run.
A week and a half after the meetings, the two sides struck a legal settlement that cleared the way for the firm to apply for federal permits for the operation.
