The Trump transition team has issued a list of 74 questions for the Energy Department, asking agency officials to identify which department employees and contractors have worked on forging an international climate pact as well as domestic efforts to cut the nation’s carbon output.
The questionnaire requests a list of those individuals who have taken part in international climate talks over the past five years and “which programs within DOE are essential to meeting the goals of President Obama’s Climate Action Plan.”
Trump and his team have vowed to dismantle specific aspects of Barack Obama’s climate policies. The questionnaire, which one Energy Department official described as unusually “intrusive” and a matter for departmental lawyers, has raised concern that the Trump transition team was trying to figure out how to target the people, including civil servants, who have helped implement policies under Obama.
Thousands of scientists have signed petitions calling on the president-elect and his team to respect scientific integrity and refrain from singling out individual researchers whose work might conflict with the new administration’s policy goals. This potential clash could prompt a major schism within the federal government, with many career officials waging a battle against incoming political appointees.
While there have been many instances of political appointees and career scientists clashing in various administrations, what appears to be novel here is the request for the names of so many individual scientists, and that it comes during the transition period, before the Trump administration has even taken power. This may be a signal of even more intense politicization after the inauguration.
Yale University environmental historian Paul Sabin said in an interview that previous administrations have worked to install like-minded energy and environmental experts in key agencies, often at the expense of employees from previous administrations.
“But what seems unusual is singling people out for a very specific substantive issue, and treating their work on that substantive issue as, by default, contaminating or disqualifying,” Sabin said, adding that now officials can track a civil servant’s past activities “in such a systematic way” compared with the past.
During Ronald Reagan’s time, when his political appointees sparred with officials at Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency, Sabin said, “It would have been so much hard to collect it on paper and track it down.”
Trump’s transition team did not respond to a request for comment. White House deputy press secretary Eric Schultz told reporters that he could not speak to the questionnaire directly, saying, “If you have questions about activity that the president-elect’s team is doing, you should check in with them and try and figure out why they’re doing it.”
But Schultz added, “All I can tell you is that President Obama is enormously proud of the work of civil servants and federal workers across the administration, that over the past eight years they’ve worked to make this country stronger. And they don’t do so out a sense of great pay or because the hours are great. They do so out of a sense of patriotism. And the president’s proud of their record.”
The questionnaire was first reported by Bloomberg News. The Post has obtained its own a copy of both the initial document as well as one with some of the agency’s replies filled in, in addition to confirmation from other people in the department.
Democratic Rep. Bill Foster of Illinois, a physicist, warned that questionnaire “threatens to undo decades of progress we have made on climate change,” and Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., said punishing civil servants for their work under previous administrations “would be tantamount to an illegal modern-day political witch hunt and would have a profoundly chilling impact on our dedicated federal workforce.”
The document spanned a broad area of Energy Department activities, including its loan program, its technology research program, responses to Congress, estimates of offshore wind and cleanup of uranium at a site once used by the military for weapons research. In many cases, the inquiries meshed with the priorities of conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation, which held a meeting on energy and environment issues in Washington on Thursday, as well as priorities outlined in a recent fundraising pitch sent by the American Energy Alliance, a wing of the Institute for Energy Research.
Thomas Pyle, who heads AEA, leads Trump’s Energy Department transition team. In a recent fundraising pitch, Pyle wrote supporters, “After eight years of the Obama administration’s divisive energy and environmental policies, the American people have voted for a change - a big change. We expect the Trump administration will adopt pro-energy and pro-market policies - much different than the Obama administration’s top-down government approach.”
One question zeroed in on the issue of the “social cost of carbon,” a way of calculating the consequences of greenhouse gas emissions. The transition team asked for a list of department employees or contractors who attended interagency meetings, the dates of the meetings, and emails and other materials associated with them.
The social cost of carbon is a metric that calculates the cost to society of emitting a ton of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The Obama administration has used this tool to try to calculate the benefits of regulations and initiatives that lead to lower greenhouse gas emissions.
At Thursday’s Heritage meeting, senior fellow David Kreutzer attacked the idea of using the social cost of carbon during the regulatory process. He said it “actually can be considered a fiction, the way it’s produced in the EPA right now,” adding it “is supposedly a measure of the damage done to the world economy for each ton of carbon emitted in a given year. Kreutzer is a member of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency transition team; Trump recently named Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, who is suing EPA over its environmental regulations, to head the EPA.
Another question appeared to delve deeply into the mechanisms behind scientific tools called “integrated assessment models,” which scientists use to forecast future changes to the climate and energy system. It also asked what the Energy Department considers to be “the proper equilibrium climate sensitivity,” which is a way that climate researchers calculate how much the planet will eventually warm, depending upon the amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere.
“My guess is that they’re trying to undermine the credibility of the science that DOE has produced, particularly in the field of climate science,” said Rob Jackson, a Stanford climate and energy researcher, in response to the question about the Integrated Assessment Models.
The questionnaire also appeared to take aim at the national laboratories, which operate with a high degree of independence but which are part of the Energy Department. The questionnaire asked for a list of the top 20 salaried employees of the labs, the labs’ peer-reviewed publications over the past three years, a list of their professional society memberships, affiliations, and the websites they maintain or contribute to “during work hours.” Researchers at national labs focus on a range of issues, including renewable energy development and climate analysis.