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Missouri ag groups rally behind Pruitt for head of EPA

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — Missouri agricultural groups and Republican lawmakers will ask Missouri’s two U.S. senators to support Pres.-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Scott Pruitt.

Pruitt currently acts as the attorney general of Oklahoma, and in that capacity he has had an adversarial role with the EPA under Pres. Barack Obama’s administration. However, agricultural groups around the nation, and now here in Missouri, have supported Trump’s decision to name Pruitt to the position.

A letter from the Missouri Cattlemen’s Association, Missouri Agribusiness Association, Missouri Dairy Association, Missouri Egg Council, Missouri Farm Bureau, Missouri Forest Products Association, Missouri Pork Producers Association, and Missouri Poultry Federation to U.S. Sens. Claire McCaskill and Roy Blunt says Pruitt is ideal for the job because “he has seen, firsthand, the real world consequences of the agency’s overreach in his state.”

“As a leader in working to restore the EPA to its original, lawful mission, Pruitt has earned bipartisan respect and recognition during his time as Attorney General,” the letter continued. “An expert of constitutional law and the federal regulatory system, Pruitt would provide the balance desperately needed at the EPA.”

In more directed statements, Missouri Republican legislators Rep. Jay Houghton and Sen. Brian Munzlinger, chairs of their respective chambers agriculture committees, called on McCaskill specifically to confirm Pruitt’s nomination.

“When the EPA regulates agriculture, Missouri’s top industry, costs rise for both the farmer and the consumer,” Munzlinger said. “I trust Scott Pruitt to protect Missouri farmers against unnecessary regulations and urge Senator McCaskill to confirm his nomination.”

Democrats in Washington have not been pleased with many of Trump’s nominations for key cabinet positions, but Pruitt especially has rubbed them the wrong way. Pruitt has been skeptical of anthropocentric, or human-caused, climate change during his political career, and he has fought against the Clean Power Plan and EPA rules on limiting methane emissions. Sen. Ed Markey said Pruitt would “become the living embodiment of the fossil-fuel and anti-clean air, anti-clean water movement in the United States of America.”