U.S. CIVIL SERVANTS charge the Trump administration is sidelining workers with expertise on climate change and the environment.
They accuse EPA, Interior heads of sidelining experts on climate change
WASHINGTON — Interior Department manager Joel Clement figured his new bosses in the Trump administration might disapprove of his climate change-focused work protecting Alaskan villages from rising seas.
But the reassignment slip Clement received in June stunned him. He was not only removed from his post as director of policy analysis, he was deposited into a new job auditing fossil fuel company leases.
About 50 such slips went out to the department’s most experienced and highly paid managers. Other recipients interviewed were just as puzzled as Clement. It seemed to them that they were getting moved for the sake of getting moved — often to jobs unrelated to their skills.
Earlier this week, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke may have shed some light on his thinking when he told a petroleum industry group that he believes nearly a third of his workforce is disloyal to the Trump agenda. “I got 30 percent of the crew that’s not loyal to the flag,” he said, in a remark first reported by The Associated Press.
Most new administrations move quickly to reorient the federal workforce toward their agenda, but they usually rely on the expertise of top-level managers such as Clement to move the stubborn levers of bureaucracy. The Trump administration approach has been different.
“I’ve talked to a lot of folks who have been around the federal government for decades and they say transitions can be tough, but what this group is doing is remarkable,” said Clement, who filed a whistler-blower complaint over the reassignment. “They have moved me into an area I know nothing about. It might as well be Chinese.”
Clement’s old job has yet to be filled. The Alaskan villages he has advocated for, he said, are on the verge of getting washed away.
At the Environmental Protection Agency, longtime civil servants, some with doctorates in environmental work, say they have been frozen out because their voluminous administrative records are out of sync with a Trump political agenda that holds much of what they do as junk science.
“The work of the EPA science arm has now been disconnected from the agency’s decision-making,” said Jeff Ruch, executive director of the advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.
Betsy Southerland left her post in August as director of science and technology at the EPA Office of Water, after she said the administration all but ignored her team’s work. Just before she left, her division had compiled what she called “excruciatingly detailed briefings” explaining the environmental damage and public health risks that would result from an industry demand to suspend restrictions on wastewater dumped by power plants.
“We thought we could present this heavy-duty technical record and convince (EPA Administrator Scott) Pruitt he should not repeal everything,” she said. “We could show that what industry was saying was just not based in fact. But it fell on deaf ears. It all went to naught.”
Her resignation came after the departure at the EPA of David Schnare, a longtime friend of the right with deep experience at the agency. The president had tasked him with aligning career staff with the Trump agenda. Schnare wrote in an op-ed article for the Inside EPA newsletter that he found the challenge insurmountable because Pruitt had little interest in hearing what the agency’s managers had to say. He wrote that he quit after Pruitt ordered staff to break the law in dealing with what Schnare opaquely described as a “sensitive issue.”
“In my view, this violated our oaths of office and placed the career staff in an untenable position,” Schnare wrote in July.
EPA climate change adviser Michael Cox, who had been with the agency 25 years, sent his own resignation letter to Pruitt in April. “We understand that our positions might not always prevail,” Cox wrote, “but please take the time to listen to expert voices that might differ from yours and your immediate staff.”
EPA officials argue that such critics don’t reflect the prevailing view at the agency, which just completed a buyout program that reduced its workforce by 440 employees. They say the complaints are politically motivated, coming from activists who want to scuttle the Trump administration agenda.