IG investigations cast shadow over Scott Pruitt

Scott Pruitt is embroiled in numerous controversies, but the biggest threat to his tenure as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) could be a government official little known outside of Washington.

Arthur Elkins, the EPA’s inspector general, is investigating Pruitt on numerous fronts. As an independent, congressionally authorized investigator, Elkins has unique access to the agency and its internal workings — and a responsibility to go public with whatever he finds.

{mosads}Elkins has already agreed to look into several matters involving Pruitt, including his travel costs, his around-the-clock security detail, his purchase of a $43,000 privacy booth and his role in the substantial pay raises that were given to top aides.

Whether Pruitt can survive in President Trump’s Cabinet could hinge significantly on Elkins’s work on those cases. It’s unclear when his findings will be released.

Elkins declined through a spokesman to be interviewed.

People who have worked with Elkins say he is the model for an inspector general, fair and thorough and able to balance being independent of the EPA while working within it.

“I worked with a lot of inspectors general during my time, and EPA’s always been one of the top ones, probably because they’re the most professional,” said a former House Republican aide who worked with Elkins on oversight projects during the Obama administration.

“They didn’t always give us the answer we’d want, but they’d work it through,” he said. “They have the best investigative team, by far, of anyone I’d worked with.”

The former aide added that Elkins kept politics out of his work.

“I couldn’t tell you what Art Elkins’s political affiliation even is, from my meetings with him,” he said.

Stan Meiburg, who was the No. 2 official at the EPA under Obama from 2014 to 2017, offered similar praise.

“I would not expect that you would see any sort of snap judgment from Art on the various allegations,” said Meiburg. “People may find that a bit frustrating, because they won’t give you an instant answer. But I think that’s a sign of their desire to be fair and make sure they have all the facts.”

During Meiburg’s time as acting deputy administrator, Elkins researched or published findings on a number of high-profile matters, like the EPA’s response to the Flint. Mich., water crisis, the Gold King Mine spill in Colorado and a handful of personnel misconduct issues, like an employee who was found with 7,000 pornographic files on his computer.

“I felt that when there were things in the inspector general’s report, I could call him up and say ‘Hey Art, I don’t think this is quite right’ and he would listen. He would listen respectfully. We did not always agree, but he would do that,” Meiburg said.

Then-President Obama nominated Elkins to his position in 2010, after he had served in a senior position in the EPA’s general counsel office for a year, and the Senate confirmed him. He supervises a staff of 252 people, with a budget just over $50 million.

Elkins earned a bachelor’s degree from New Jersey’s Thomas Edison State University in 1982 and went on to receive a master’s from Baldwin Wallace University and a law degree from Cleveland State University, both in Ohio.

His first legal jobs were in Cleveland, starting in the Cuyahoga County public defender’s office and then in the county prosecutor’s office.

Elkins left Ohio in 1999 to work in a series of federal government counsel and inspector general positions, including as an attorney at the Defense Department and as general counsel for the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency.

Elkins has stated in the past that he sees his job as furthering the EPA’s mission.

“At the end of the day, we’re all on the same page. We all work for an agency, and the mission of the agency is our mission. For the EPA, it’s to protect public health and the environment,” he told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in 2015. “That’s my job, to do that, as well.”

Paul Light, a professor of public service at New York University who has written extensively on federal inspectors general, said Elkins’s qualifications line him up to be an effective watchdog.

“This is not a job for the faint of heart. You’re going to be unpopular, you’re going to be vilified, you’re going to be criticized,” Light said.

Elkins has some detractors. Steve Milloy, an outspoken critic of many EPA regulations and scientific findings on air pollution and climate change, accused him of being a partisan hack.

Milloy, who served on Trump’s transition team for the EPA, asked Elkins in 2012 to investigate his charge that the EPA illegally exposed people to dangerous concentrations of diesel pollution without proper consent for research. Elkins concluded that the EPA followed applicable policies.

“All of this stuff is really trivial,” Milloy said of the controversies involving Pruitt.

“I think he’s partisan. He’s like all the Obama holdovers; they’re partisan,” Milloy said, adding that Trump should fire Elkins.

The inspectors general have proven to be important allies to or checks on the Trump administration, depending on the situation.

Acting Interior Department Inspector General Mary Kendall, for example, published reports recently questioning whether Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke needed to take a charter flight last year from Las Vegas to Montana and declaring that she can’t conclude whether his mass reassignments of senior career officials were proper because agency officials didn’t keep thorough records.

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, meanwhile, published a report last month that provided the grounds for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to fire former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, whom Trump often chastised.

Congress created the inspectors general in 1978, giving dozens of officials the power to be an independent check on the actions of federal agencies.

“It’s a good-government idea, that you have to have a unified presence, near the top of the agency, with access to the secretary or the administrator, but with the power to notify Congress and the president of any wrongdoing,” said Light.

Some inspectors general, like Elkins, report directly to the president, not their agency heads. They serve indefinite terms, but a president can remove one so long as he notifies Congress and justifies the move.

Light said the most testing times for inspectors general are when they are investigating the heads of their agencies, as Elkins is now doing.

“It doesn’t matter which president you’re talking about, which party you’re talking about, the president and the senior staff don’t take kindly to the IG, because whatever they’re digging out is going to be made public and going to be pursued,” he said.