The Environmental Protection Agency, which is slated for initial budget cuts of 30 percent, has requested additional security for its director, Scott Pruitt.

The Washington Post, which obtained details of the EPA’s budget, seemingly cannot figure out why such an increase would be necessary. After all, they point out, Obama’s EPA chief, Gina McCarthy, only required door-to-door protection, meaning she was without security while at home. But McCarthy oversaw an ever expanding EPA, not a contracting one where ideaologues and disgruntled employees create a higher threat risk, which they admit was brought up during the transition.

Myron Ebell, who led the EPA transition for the Trump administration but has since returned to his role at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told E&E News this year that it would make sense for Pruitt to receive increased protection.

“I think it’s prudent given the continuing activities by the left to foment hatred and the reported hostility within the agency from some unprofessional activists,” Ebell said at the time.

The two reasons why more protection for Scott Pruitt is a prudent request from the EPA are likely two-fold. Slashing the department’s budget nearly in half will mean that there will be scores of federal employees losing their livlihood and benefits. Add to that the second reason, ideology.

The EPA is a department devoted to ideology. Recent sweeping EPA regulations during the Obama era, like the ‘Waters of The United States’ rule, is a perfect example of the broad and unnecessary overreach the environmentalist ideology permits to stifle American businesses of all sizes and encroach on the rights of property owners.

The ideology within the EPA that covers climate svience and Pruitt’s intention of scaling back federal funding of such research also has radical environmentalist’s head exploding. There is actually a large group of leftists so convinced the Trump administration is just going to start deleting data owned by the American people they’ve started a coordinated effort to move digital files to private servers and even out of the country.

Essentially, they’ve lost what was left of their rational minds over Donald Trump and Republicans having their hands involved in anything. Environmentalism for many of them, is their religion. When someone starts messing around with fanatic’s religion, there is clearly a heightened threat that something could happen.

Let’s hope the extra security is never needed and that environmentalists and global warming alarmists have enough sense to not try to harm anyone. But beefing up security for someone as controversial and threatening to a group of ideological fanatics shouldn’t be perplexing. It’s the wise and prudent thing to do.