After 17 years in government at the Environmental Protection Agency and in Congress, Byron Brown has left the EPA and will join Crowell & Moring as senior counsel later this month.

Brown, who was deputy chief of staff under ousted EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, left the agency on Friday. He said his decision to leave government work was “independent” of his beleaguered boss' July exit, which Brown said he first learned about via Twitter on returning from a vacation.

Brown previously served as senior counsel for Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Oklahoma, chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works and a prominent skeptic of human-caused climate change. Brown also spent a decade in the Office of General Counsel at the EPA.