Who is Andrew Wheeler and why you should be afraid of him.
With Scott Pruitt's resignation, Andrew Wheeler will be the acting director of the EPA. And by pointing out that he is Senate-confirmed, is DT telegraphing that he might eventually fire Sessions and replace him with Wheeler? (Who would then fire Mueller?)
https://www.nrdc.org/onearth/who-andrew-wheeler-and-why-you-should-be-afraid-him
Scott Pruitt’s long record of misdeeds and malfeasance finally seems to have caught up with him. Whether his numerous scandals, recently making headlines, will cost him his job as head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is still an open question. President Trump has been tweeting his support of his EPA administrator, doing whatever he can to dispel growing rumors of an imminent firing or an abrupt resignation. But given the drip-drip-drip of near-daily revelations, it’s safe to assume that news editors already have their Pruitt postmortems written, copyedited, and ready to publish at a moment’s notice. In this administration, a statement of support from the White House shouldn’t be taken as a sign that one’s job is safe. (Indeed, it’s often an ominous prelude to termination. Just ask H. R. McMaster or Rex Tillerson.)
Meanwhile, there’s another big EPA story that’s deserving of our attention but getting far less of it. Yesterday a slim majority of senators approved Andrew Wheeler to be the EPA’s deputy administrator―the person who could end up running the agency should the current administrator suddenly decide (as so, so many Washingtonians before him have decided) that he really wants to spend more time with his family.
If you’re hoping Wheeler could represent some sort of departure from Pruitt’s (literal) scorched-earth agenda, he wouldn’t. While it may be impossible to imagine anyone worse than Pruitt to lead our nation’s environmental policy, plenty of individuals could be just as bad. And as he’s shown us on numerous occasions, President Trump has a sixth sense for ferreting these people out and putting them on the executive-branch payroll.
So who is Andrew Wheeler? And what is it about his particular career trajectory that makes the White House, energy-company executives, and assorted climate deniers think he’s a perfect fit for the Trump-era EPA?
SNIP
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