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WASHINGTON — The cost of the security services to protect Scott Pruitt, the former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, more than doubled in Mr. Pruitt’s first 11 months on the job and the agency failed to justify his requests for protection, according to a report released Tuesday by the E.P.A.’s inspector general.
The audit found no documented evidence to support Mr. Pruitt’s need round-the-clock security. Previous E.P.A. administrators typically had received door-to-door escorts.
The cost to taxpayers of protecting the E.P.A. chief grew from $1.6 million spent on security for one of his Obama-era predecessors, Gina McCarthy, to $3.5 million for Mr. Pruitt, the inspector general found.
The report concluded that the E.P.A. administrator’s protective service detail, which provides physical protection and escorts to the E.P.A. chief, has no final, approved operating procedures addressing the level of protection required for the administrator.
Mr. Pruitt’s security went well beyond that of his predecessors and drew sharp criticism. He received round-the-clock protection, according to documents previously made public by the E.P.A. inspector general, from a security detail that ultimately grew to a team of more than 20 people, costing about twice as much as his predecessors Lisa P. Jackson and Ms. McCarthy.
Mr. Pruitt’s entourage accompanied him on official travel, but the full-time protection also accompanied him on personal trips including those to his home state of Oklahoma as well as on a family vacation to Disneyland, the Rose Bowl and college basketball games. Those revelations led the E.P.A. inspector general to open its investigation in April.
The report notes that the current acting E.P.A. administrator, Andrew Wheeler, has ended Mr. Pruitt’s practice of round-the-clock security protection, returning to the practice of his predecessors of door-to-door protection.
The agency justified Mr. Pruitt’s security by saying he faced unparalleled threats from people who disliked his deregulatory agenda. The former administrator also pinned many of the decisions about his level of protection — as well as other decisions, such as purchasing a $43,000 soundproof phone booth and flying first-class — on the man who served as the head of his detail, Pasquale Perrotta, commonly known as Nino.
Mr. Perrotta, a former Secret Service agent who made a name for himself in the Bronx district attorney’s office building a racketeering case against John A. (Junior) Gotti, the longtime boss of the Gambino crime family, retired in May amid coverage of his role in organizing Mr. Pruitt’s security.
Agency officials at the time described Mr. Perrotta as encouraging Mr. Pruitt’s costliest requests, including armored vehicles and the use of first-class flights to limit the administrator’s exposure to fellow passengers, and pushing aside people who questioned the need for such steps. Three agency officials told The New York Times that Eric Weese, who had previously served as head of the E.P.A. protective detail, was removed and replaced with Mr. Perrotta after questioning some of Mr. Pruitt’s requests.
Mr. Perrotta later came under congressional scrutiny for recommending that Mr. Pruitt’s office be swept for surveillance devices by a company owned by a business associate.
Ultimately, the E.P.A. inspector general identified 33 threats against Mr. Pruitt, a number that was about average for an E.P.A. agency head. Among them were threats made in Twitter messages, emails, postcards and phone calls, as well as one letter from an inmate.
Jean Bloom, one of the investigators who conducted the report, said in a podcast accompanying the audit that the E.P.A. said it used an August 2017 inspector general report to support the increased level of protection. But that report, Ms. Bloom said, included only statistical data of threats and did not assess the potential dangers presented by them. It also was prepared a full six months after the decision to bolster Mr. Pruitt’s protection, she said.
The audit also found that the E.P.A. essentially had little way to assess what level of security Mr. Pruitt truly needed, or whether the threats his staff said he faced warranted increasing the traditional six-person security team to round-the-clock protection from 19 agents.
Ms. Bloom said the decision to have twenty-four hour protection for Mr. Pruitt was made before he arrived at E.P.A. by President Trump’s transition team, and keeping that level of protection fell to the administrator’s staff.
Mr. Pruitt’s coverage was supposed to have been re-evaluated after his first two weeks in office, with internal E.P.A. agencies conducting analyses of costs as well as threat assessments. The inspector general found that a cost analysis existed but no threat assessment was found.
“So, the absence of procedures resulted in unclear lines of authority, inconsistent practices, inappropriate or inadequate staffing and excessive or unnecessary costs for the agency,” said Tia Elbaum, a spokeswoman for the inspector general’s office.
