Elizabeth Kolbert

Well, they listed five areas of concerns.

And the first one was that he was terribly partisan, that he would use his public appearances and public communications effectively.

to attack the other party, sometimes by name.

He kept referring to these funds that had been appropriated really under the previous administration as a scam.

So they were very disturbed by that level of partisanship, the notion that the EPA is supposed to be basically calling the shots objectively and that this seemed to be undermining that.

It was clear that they were going to dismantle what was called the Office of Research and Development, which was the EPA scientific arm, which is 1,500 people who spent their lives trying to figure out what environmental threats we are facing and also sort of scanning the horizon.

What environmental threats are we going to face?

They were dismayed about his tendency to side with industry on a lot of key issues.

They were very upset about his treatment of the workforce.

I mean, if you go back to Russ Vogt and Project 2025 and these tapes that came out of Russ Vogt saying we're going to put...

employees of the federal government in trauma.

We want to put them in trauma.

He explicitly mentions the EPA.

And I think many employees felt that they had successfully been put in trauma, that that was not an appropriate way to run an agency.

Yeah, they were put on administrative leave, which is, you know, sort of pending this investigation.

And at the end of the day, so months later, many of them were suspended without pay for a few weeks.

So they lost a few weeks pay and several of them were fired.

Well, quite simply, the job of the EPA, and this is their stated mission and remains their stated mission even now, is to protect public health and the environment.

The EPA is really a public health organization.

Certainly many of the