Top EPA officials are working for unnamed outside clients

Well this sure looks bad: According to letters released Monday, two senior officials were given permission to take on outside work while still employed full-time for Trump’s U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Special assistant Patrick Davis and John Konkus, a deputy associate administrator in the Office of Public Affairs, received permission to take on personal consulting clients. Konkus, a former Trump campaign aide, oversees solicitations and approvals of EPA grants worth hundreds of millions of dollars—grants he's regularly slashed or stripped of any reference to climate change. The names of his private clients were redacted. Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee said it best in a letter to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt: “A political appointee cutting millions of dollars in funding to EPA grant recipients on what appears to be a politically motivated basis, while at the same time being authorized to serve as a paid media consultant to unnamed outside clients, raises serious concerns of potential conflicts of interest.”