EPA chief seeks to reassure employees as specter of Trump looms

EPA chief seeks to reassure employees as specter of Trump looms

When President Biden took office in January 2021, the Environmental Protection Agency was a shell of its former self. Climate scientists had been sidelined, employee morale had plummeted, and hundreds of workers had left the agency under President Donald Trump, who once vowed to eliminate the EPA “in almost every form.”

On Thursday morning — hours before the first presidential debate of the 2024 election — EPA Administrator Michael Regan reminded his staff of this era and reassured them about the future. In a speech to roughly 600 EPA employees, Regan recounted how the Trump administration hobbled the agency and how the Biden administration has rebuilt it.

The Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in political activity while on the job, made the speech tricky for Regan. He took care not to violate the act; he did not mention Trump by name or explicitly endorse Biden.

Instead, he rebuked efforts by “the previous administration” to force out, sideline or mute federal scientists. During Trump’s first year in office, for instance, his political appointees barred three EPA scientists from speaking about climate change at a conference in Rhode Island.

“The previous administration ambushed scientific integrity — undermining our agency’s most fundamental principles,” Regan said, adding: “You all spoke to me about how facts were rejected, your recommendations were ignored and research — lifesaving research — was stifled. In those early days, I can vividly remember feeling the weight of the task we had before us.”

The address came amid mounting fears within the EPA that climate science and other research would be suppressed in a second Trump term. To address these concerns, the union representing nearly half of the agency’s workers recently approved a new contract that includes first-of-their-kind protections from political meddling.

Regan’s speech — the contents of which were first reported by The Washington Post — also came hours after the Supreme Court blocked the EPA’s plan to curb industrial air pollution that blows across state lines. The decision in Ohio v. EPA dealt another setback to the agency’s authority to regulate pollution under the Clean Air Act.

Regan did not mention the ruling in his address. He did, however, announce that the EPA has hired 5,200 new employees since Biden took office. In comparison, nearly 1,600 workers left the EPA during the first 18 months of the Trump administration, while fewer than 400 were hired. That exodus shrank the agency’s workforce to levels not seen since Ronald Reagan’s administration.

“Because of the previous administration’s flagrant disregard for science, we lost hundreds of world-class experts and staff, and with them went decades of valuable institutional knowledge,” Regan said.

In addition, Regan warned that the country — and the planet — cannot afford four more years of climate inaction, particularly as deadly heat waves smash temperature records across five continents this month.

“It’s very clear that America needs a very strong EPA,” Regan said in an interview before the address, which he delivered at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in downtown D.C., in the same complex as the EPA headquarters and blocks from the White House.

“Climate change is getting worse; 2023 was the warmest year since global records began,” he said. “ … When you look at the time lost during the previous administration, we simply do not need to go back to that lack of protection.”

Trump has called climate change a “hoax,” and his administration weakened or wiped out more than 125 environmental rules and policies. In contrast, Biden has called global warming an “existential threat,” and his EPA has finalized the strongest-ever limits on planet-warming emissions from passenger cars and power plants.

Regan, the first Black man to lead the EPA, also touted the agency’s efforts to protect communities of color that are disproportionately burdened by pollution. He highlighted a ban on the last form of asbestos still in use, the first federal limits on “forever chemicals” in drinking water, and tougher restrictions on cancer-causing gases from chemical plants.

Trump and his allies have argued that bloated federal agencies have hurt economic development nationwide. “One of the things that is so bad for us is the environmental agencies — they make it impossible to do anything,” the former president said in an interview with “Fox & Friends” that aired this month, claiming that “they’ve stopped you from doing business in this country.”

Some leaders in the fossil fuel industry, a frequent foe of the Biden administration, have urged Trump to again shrink the EPA in a second term.

“This administration has done a good job of ballooning the bureaucracy at EPA,” said Tom Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance and the former head of Trump’s Energy Department transition team. “In addition to using EPA to throttle back the oil and gas industry, the coal industry, they at the same time have … made it more difficult for President Trump to downsize the workforce.”

Climate advocates, in contrast, have argued that a robust EPA is essential to reining in runaway global warming and that the stakes of the election couldn’t be higher.

“Elections are about the future, and few things will shape the future more than our response to the climate crisis,” said Manish Bapna, president and CEO of NRDC Action Fund, the political arm of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “This is an election between a climate champ and a climate chump.”

The presidential debate will air Thursday at 9 p.m. Eastern and will be hosted by CNN. It will take place in Atlanta, which now sees about eight more days of extreme heat than it did in 1961, according to the Fifth National Climate Assessment, the federal government’s preeminent report on the impacts of climate change across the United States.