Since this week has been nothing but wall-to-wall Texas disinformation (the Wall Street Journal has yet another editorial tripling down on the lie, and a column doing the same) today we’re catching up on a great piece from last week.
Zahra Hirji spoke to a variety of EPA veterans for Buzzfeed to get a sense of just how bad it was under Trump, and how things are feeling now that President Biden has taken office.
Gary Morton, for example, worked at the EPA for 26 years before retiring in 2019, and told Hirji that when Trump came in and began “dismantling the existing framework of environmental protection” that he “had never experienced an attack like that.” But you know who wasn’t feeling any pressure from Trump’s EPA? Polluters.
Trump officials scrapped preemptive measures, “so now companies no longer had to take preventative measures to ensure a spill didn’t occur.” Enforcement officers like Morton were also required to get permission from the Administration to even request data from polluters.
Morton was one of 800 EPA staff who left during the Trump administration’s hostile reign, where he told Hirji that Trump appointees “came in and created an atmosphere of intimidation and fear over the employees.”
For example, the only time Trump bothered to make the trip from his hotel, all the way across the street to the EPA, was to undo Obama’s Clean Power Plan at an event the EPA staffers only learned of that day. “It was basically just a slap in the face,” former water chief Elizabeth Southerland said. But, she added, “it wasn’t just climate change these guys went after. It was an all-out assault, across the board, on all statues.”
One of the most reprehensible and cross-cutting assaults was the tobacco industry’s “secret science” rule. The official EPA point of contact for someone seeking more information about the rule was Tom Sinks, who at the time was the director of the Office of the Science Advisor. But he “had never seen a draft of the rule until it was released to the public. The only secret about the ‘secret science’ rule was that the rule was drafted behind closed doors by individuals who were never named.” (Probably because even the Trump administration would’ve been embarrassed to put defender-of-deadly-industries Steve Milloy’s name anywhere official.)
EPA Attorney and union leader Joyce Howell made it clear agency staff still bear the scars of that mistreatment — “How do you build trust with people who have basically been traumatized?” Environmental engineer and union rep Undine Kipka said that people are still “rattled” and “shocked” at the extent of “what they could not do or say under the past administration.” Part of rebuilding the EPA will require addressing the uncomfortable fact that “there’s not a lot of trust in the middle management group that has colluded with the old administration,” EPA lawyer and union leader Nicole Cantello told Hirji.
While it’s easy enough for the Biden administration to clear out the obvious idiots, rebuilding trust and staff will be a top priority for Biden, and his EPA chief Michael Regan. It’s a tricky job, but Regan might be the best one to do it. When he became head of North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality, it was in a similar situation, gutted by Republican leadership. Specifically, his predecessor Donald R. van der Vaart, who was a Trump science advisor (lol) and considered by Trump for EPA admin, likely because of his experience systematically dismantling NC’s DEQ.
At his Senate Committee hearing, Regan noted that when he “inherited the Department of Environmental Quality in 2017, morale was low. Decisions had been made that we didn’t believe were transparent and didn’t bring forth the proper science and data.”
Sound familiar?
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