Whatever you consider to be the mission of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), agency administrator and paranoid grifter Scott Pruitt can't be accomplishing very much at the moment.
Axios reports that Pruitt has closed off access to most of his own appointees and senior staff and will only meet with the cronies he brought with him from Oklahoma where he was the state attorney general.
Over the last few months, Pruitt has walled himself off from all but five EPA political appointees: Millan Hupp, Sarah Greenwalt, Hayley Ford, Lincoln Ferguson, and Wilcox. Of those five, only Wilcox is over 30. Hupp, Greenwalt and Ferguson came with Pruitt from Oklahoma. Wilcox is the only press aide Pruitt appears to trust.
Pruitt’s chief of staff, Ryan Jackson, runs the agency’s operations but rarely knows where his boss is. Pruitt has frozen Jackson out of his inner circle — a disaster for a chief of staff. Pruitt and Jackson don’t trust each other, multiple sources told me.
"All of us have been frozen out over time," one EPA political appointee told me. "It's absolutely unreal working here. Everyone's miserable. Nobody talks. It's a dry wall prison."
To be clear, these are not career officials. These are appointees chosen by Pruitt. He isn't speaking to his own people.
One senior official told Axios that they only knew about Pruitt's recent whereabouts because a lobbyist tweeted a photo of Pruitt at a restaurant.
I think that says it all.