EPA Administrator Regan Faces Unenviable Task Of Reassuring Employees And Scientists

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.

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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.”

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/06/27/trump-epa-chief-climate-science/