The scandal-ridden cabinet member is gone from his post as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, but the costs of his tenure are still being tabulated. One of his most notorious expenditures was the $43,000 for a highly protected phone booth where he could enjoy secure telephone conversations. The Washington Post reports that Pruitt only made one outgoing call with the book, on June 20th, to discuss a lawsuit launched by the Sierra Club. It’s not clear how many incoming calls he took, but Pruitt himself says he used the booth “sparingly.”
Assuming only a handful of other calls, each one cost tax payers many thousands of dollars. The construction of the cone of silence was bedeviled with cost overruns. “While the original contract for the phone booth was slated to cost roughly $25,000, the agency ended up paying contractors an additional $18,000 to convert a closet space that could house it,” The Washington Post notes. “That work included removing closed-circuit television equipment, pouring 55 square feet of concrete, installing a drop ceiling and patching and painting the room.”
Andrew Wheeler, acting head of the EPA, doesn’t plan on using the phone booth but won’t dismantle it either. For now, the phone booth will continue in weird limbo between disuse and destruction, like the statue of deposed king, a monument to the folly of an earlier era. “It’s there,” Wheeler acknowledged. “It would be expensive to tear it apart. I don’t see any sense in tearing it apart. And in this day and age, I don’t know what the assessment was for the need of it.”