CLEAR THE AIR

EPA Staff Backchanneling With Biden to Plan Massive Rollback of Trump’s Rollbacks: NYT

As Trump’s appointed head of the agency tries to finalize deregulations, newly emboldened agency employees are fighting back.

Longtime staff at the Environmental Protection Agency are holding backchannel discussions with President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team to reinstate a number of protections rolled back by President Donald Trump’s administration, The New York Times reports. “They are focused like a laser on what I call the ‘Humpty Dumpty approach,’ which is putting the agency back together again,” Judith Enck, a regional administrator under President Barack Obama, told the Times. At the same time, EPA employees are fighting against deregulations planned by current agency head Andrew Wheeler for the final months of Trump’s term as he finalizes a new rule that would require scientists to disclose their raw data for any medical studies on air and water pollution—a move experts say would hamstring environmental contaminant control efforts.