EPA chief seeks to reassure employees amid Trump threat

When President Biden took office in January 2021, the Environmental Protection Agency was a shadow 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 had vowed to abolish the EPA in almost all its forms.

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

The Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in political activities while on the job, made Regan's speech tricky. He was careful not to break the law; he did not mention Trump by name or explicitly support Biden.

Instead, he criticized the previous administration’s efforts to exclude, marginalize or silence federal scientists. During Trump’s first year in office, for example, his political appointees banned three EPA scientists from speaking about climate change at a conference in Rhode Island.

“The previous administration ambushed scientific integrity, undermining the most fundamental principles of our agency,” Regan said, adding, “You have all told me about how facts were dismissed, your recommendations ignored, and research that could have saved lives was stifled. At that time, I remember vividly feeling the weight of the task before us.”

The speech comes amid growing concerns at the EPA that climate and other research will be stifled in a second Trump term. To address those concerns, the union that represents nearly half of the agency’s employees recently approved a new contract that includes unprecedented protections against political interference.

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 reduce industrial air pollution that crosses state lines. The decision in Ohio v. EPA was a further setback to the agency’s power to regulate pollution under the Clean Air Act.

Regan did not mention the decision in his speech. He did, however, announce that the EPA has hired 5,200 new employees since Biden took office. By comparison, nearly 1,600 workers left the EPA in the first 18 months of the Trump administration, while fewer than 400 were hired. This exodus has reduced the agency's workforce to levels not seen since the administration of Ronald Reagan.

Because of previous administrations' blatant disregard for science, we lost hundreds of world-class experts and staff, and with them decades of valuable institutional knowledge, Regan said.

Additionally, Regan warned that the country and the planet cannot afford four more years of climate inaction, especially as deadly heat waves break temperature records on five continents this month.

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

Climate change is getting worse: 2023 was the hottest year since global records began, he said. When you look at the time lost under the previous administration, we simply don’t need to go back to this lack of protection.

Trump has called climate change a hoax and his administration has weakened or eliminated more than 125 environmental rules and policies. In contrast, Biden has called global warming an existential threat and his EPA finalized the strictest limits ever on greenhouse gas 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 affected by pollution. He highlighted a ban on the last remaining form of asbestos, the first federal limits on permanent chemicals in drinking water and tighter 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's so bad for us is the environmental agencies that make it impossible to take action, the former president said in an interview with Fox & Friends that aired this month, saying they've made it impossible for you to do business in this country.

Some fossil fuel industry executives, often hostile to the Biden administration, have urged Trump to cut the EPA again in a second term.

According to Tom Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance and former head of Trump's Department of Energy transition team, this administration has done a good job increasing EPA bureaucracy. In addition to using the EPA to rein in the oil and gas industry and the coal industry, it has at the same time made it more difficult for President Trump to downsize.

Climate advocates, on the other hand, have argued that a strong EPA is essential to curbing runaway global warming and that the stakes in the election could not 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 the NRDC Action Fund, the political arm of the Natural Resources Defense Council. This is an election between a climate champion and a climate fool.

The presidential debate will air Thursday at 9 p.m. ET and will be hosted by CNN. It will take place in Atlanta, which is currently experiencing about eight more days of extreme heat than 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.

correction

A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium was a few blocks from EPA headquarters. In fact, it's in the same complex as the EPA headquarters. The article has been corrected.

Sources 1/ https://Google.com/ 2/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/06/27/trump-epa-chief-climate-science/ The mention sources can contact us to remove/changing this article

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