Scott Pruitt is unlike any former EPA chief - Business Insider

The first months of the Trump administration have brought a rare blizzard of news about the Environmental Protection Agency.

Scott Pruitt, at the helm, has taken an unusually public role for an EPA chief. He makes news regularly with press appearances and regulatory decisions that sometime seem bizarre for a regulator charged with the safety of America's environment. And he arrived at a moment of apparent turmoil for the EPA.

There were days of press silence from the agency starting as soon as Trump took office. A former transition official, Myron Ebell, gave interviews in which he suggested the agency's staff and budget would be cut to a third of its size. Rumors flew, including the suggestion that Trump intended to ban science at the agency and scrub climate data from its servers. Trump's transition head emailed employees to tell them he had no idea what the president's plans were.

Those plans eventually cleared up, to the tune of a proposed 32% budget cut that Pruitt publicly supported. (That proposal never made it in to Congress's budget agreement, however.)

The public seems to have noticed all the turmoil. Since Trump won the 2016 presidential election, Business Insider readers have shown a renewed interest in environmental coverage. In March, a Gallup poll found that 57% percent of Americans think Trump is doing a "poor" job protecting the environment, a far worse ranking than George W. Bush or Barack Obama received in their first years.

All of which made us wonder: As he approaches his 100-day mark in late May, how unusual has Pruitt's short tenure at the agency really been?

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