Don’t believe any reports of transition turmoil at EPA

Actions at the local office of the Environmental Protection Agency provide insight into what happens when a new president takes control of the executive branch of our government.

What is taking place is familiar to the senior career staff members, who have been through all of this before. Most of them identify the process as “normal.”

As a presidential appointee participating in the very same thing eight years ago, I wondered if news headlines and reports of some kind of meltdown at the agency were actually true.

I made contact with former associates in the Dallas regional office where I served, and they confirmed my belief that the media and the nation’s environmental organizations were and are leaving a false impression of chaos.

Soon after Barack Obama was elected, his transition team showed up to begin the process of gaining familiarity of operations at the agency so they could be ready to implement the new president’s policies upon his inauguration.

Among those leading the work was Lisa P. Jackson, who would become the new Senate-confirmed administrator of the agency, following a process of denigrating the Bush administration and its political team.

But in the transition before change of administrations, even she was careful not to interfere with daily operations.

Then when Obama moved into the Oval Office, orders and memoranda were issued with the effect of controlling regulatory initiatives and actions of the staff until his party’s loyalists could be installed.

That’s what is happening now, and it’s not only not new but relatively routine.

So much so that the acting regional administrator, a capable and respected career executive, assembled the work force in Dallas to say the agency’s mission of protecting human health and the environment will continue.

A few days later, the temporary head of the agency in Washington, also a career professional, released a video in which she delivered the same message and debunked reports that the new Trump administration was singling out EPA with some kind of draconian orders.

Translation: media reports have been full of untruths.

The Trump team’s instructions to executive branch offices apply throughout the government, and they “have not issued any additional directives specifically to EPA.”

Environmental groups, using Trump’s election as a fundraising opportunity, and some left-wing news outlets would lead the public to believe that environmental protection might suffer under Trump.

That’s ridiculous, of course, but it’s an example of how Democrat partisans are seizing every opportunity to trash Trump’s initiatives.

What will likely happen at EPA is some review and pullback of the overreach of the agency in regulatory initiatives dealing with climate change.

The war on coal may be abated, but the progress toward a cleaner environment that has led to longer, healthier lives for the American people during the past 46 years since EPA was created in the Nixon administration will go on.

As controversial as the matter of climate change seems to be, in the latest annual Pew Research report of what the American people identify as priorities for our government, climate change remains only three points above the last of the 18 concerns on the list.

If President Trump implements change in the direction of EPA’s climate work, it will reflect the majority will of the people of our country.

Isn’t that what is supposed to happen?

This story was originally published February 3, 2017 at 3:27 PM with the headline "Don’t believe any reports of transition turmoil at EPA."