The precious environmental snowflakes at the Environmental Protection Agency are melting down due to Donald Trump’s ascendancy, and a picture taken from inside the agency reveals how the EPA is desperately trying to ice the employees before they turn into simple puddles on the floor:
Yup, you saw that clearly. The EPA is helping its employees “deal with change.”
One suspects that the EPA is not referring to the problems of too many nickels and dimes in the employees’ pockets.
Nope. That sign may have been posted after the former head of President Donald Trump’s transition team at the EPA, Myron Ebell, told AP on Thursday that Trump will likely cut significant numbers of jobs at the EPA. Ebell stated, “Let’s aim for half and see how it works out, and then maybe we’ll want to go further,” adding, “President Trump said during the campaign that he would like to abolish the EPA, or ‘leave a little bit. I think the administration is likely to start proposing cuts to the 15,000 staff, because the fact is that a huge amount of the work of the EPA is actually done by state agencies. It’s not clear why so many employees are needed at the federal level.”
Ebell also asserted that it was reasonable to expect Trump to cut roughly $1 billion from the EPA’s roughly $8 billion annual budget.
Former Republican EPA Administrator William K. Reilly tried to calm the waters roiled by Ebell, countering, “I would tell the EPA staff that, in my experience, transition teams often have zero influence. They shouldn’t be taken that seriously. They’re just ideologues. They don’t work for and are not even known to the incoming cabinet.”
But as the poet John Donne might have warned the EPA employees, “Never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”