EVA, FETCH THE COFFEE:

 On Friday afternoon, Pruitt had lunch with four members of his team at Ambar restaurant on Capitol Hill. The gathering came as a surprise to just about the entire senior staff of the EPA; they found out about the meeting from a picture a lobbyist tweeted.

Over the last few months, Pruitt has walled himself off from all but five EPA political appointees: Millan Hupp, Sarah Greenwalt, Hayley Ford, Lincoln Ferguson, and Wilcox. Of those five, only Wilcox is over 30. Hupp, Greenwalt and Ferguson came with Pruitt from Oklahoma. Wilcox is the only press aide Pruitt appears to trust.

Pruitt's chief of staff, Ryan Jackson, runs the agency's operations but rarely knows where his boss is. Pruitt has frozen Jackson out of his inner circle -- a disaster for a chief of staff. Pruitt and Jackson don't trust each other, multiple sources told me.

"All of us have been frozen out over time," one EPA political appointee told me. "It's absolutely unreal working here. Everyone's miserable. Nobody talks. It's a dry wall prison."

Pruitt never trusted the EPA's career staff. But for the first 10 months of his tenure as EPA administrator, he kept most political appointees at least partially in the loop. Now, he's frozen out almost all of them. [...]

The bottom line: Pruitt has grown paranoid and isolated, and he only trusts a small handful of people at the agency. Senior White House staff darkly joke among themselves every time a fresh bad story comes out about Pruitt. Numerous senior EPA staff have already resigned or plan to quit.

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