Trump 2.0 will be a disaster for federal employees working on climate action

In the wake of Donald Trump’s re-election to the White House, many smart observers have argued that even the incoming administration’s open hostility to climate action can’t stop the global clean energy transition.

“No matter what Trump may say, the shift to clean energy is unstoppable and our country is not turning back,” Gina McCarthy, President Joe Biden’s first National Climate Advisor, told the Guardian.

McCarthy is right. Clean energy resources like onshore wind and solar are the cheapest new-build technologies almost everywhere, and deployment is soaring. Solar PV additions in the first half of 2024 were up 36% globally, and 80% in the US, over the same period in 2023, the International Energy Agency noted in its latest Clean Energy Market Monitor report.

While it’s true Trump cannot stop the energy transition, he can slow it down. And he will do so by undoing some of what made the Biden administration so successful in developing and implementing energy and climate policy: hiring competent people to staff federal agencies and run the government.

The incoming Trump team plans to immediately reverse course.

“The model for this transition is President Biden, Mr. Trump’s allies said. On the first day of the Biden administration, hundreds of staff members were hired and in place to focus on climate change. The Trump team aims to do the reverse,” the New York Times’ Coral Davenport and Lisa Friedman reported last week.

“They have the model of what Biden did the first day, the first week, the first month. We’ll look at what Biden did and put a ‘not’ in front of it,” Myron Ebell, who led the EPA transition team ahead of Trump’s first term, told Davenport and Friedman.

Ebell correctly diagnosed an unappreciated strength of the Biden presidency. The administration filled key energy and climate roles with people like Costa Samaras and Sonia Aggarwal, Kate Gordon and Jigar Shah – experts who left academia, think tanks, or the private sector for tours in government service.

But what is coming from Trump 2.0 goes well beyond swapping these experts for anti-regulatory idealogues with ties to industry. The incoming Trump administration wants to drive rank-and-file career civil servants from the federal government altogether.

The Schedule F reforms proposed under the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which will be the new administration’s governing playbook, despite Trump’s attempts to distance himself from the document during the campaign, would make it easier for the new administration to fire tens of thousands of federal employees by removing their jobs’ civil service protections. These employees would be reclassified as at-will political appointees, their jobs subject to the whims of the White House.

But Trump also wants to reprise a policy he used to disastrous effects in his first term: relocating potentially thousands of employees out of Washington, D.C.

“According to people involved in the talks, the transition team is particularly eager to move forward with Mr. Trump’s vision of relocating tens of thousands of federal employees, starting at the E.P.A. Those discussions are in early stages, the people involved said,” Davenport and Friedman reported.

When Trump tried this in his first term, scores of Washington-based employees at the Bureau of Land Management and Department of Agriculture’s research arm chose to leave the government rather than relocate to Colorado and Kansas, respectively.

For the mission-driven career employees at the EPA (my brother is one of them), relocation might just be the final straw that pushes them to leave. Already, anyone near retirement is likely thinking about an early exit, especially longtime employees who served during the first Trump term and the George W. Bush presidency.

Trump’s team knows this. The goal is not, as Trump put it in a video at his campaign website, to move employees “out of Washington to places filled with patriots who love America.” Trump followed that comment with the real goal: “This is how I will shatter the deep state.”

Myron Ebell’s admiring recognition of the Biden administration’s success in staffing the government with experts who could execute decarbonization policies is the real tell. Trump’s team knows that personnel is policy.

The Trump-Vance White House will use Schedule F reforms, relocation, and still other means to push demoralized federal employees out the door. Thousands of employees left the EPA during Trump’s first term. Thousands more will leave during Trump 2.0.

Trump’s team knows it needs to keep just enough career civil servants in place to write new rules to overturn Biden-era regulations such as EPA rules to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, power plants, and the oil and gas sector. But they would also be happy to watch tens of thousands more employees depart over the next four years, leaving federal agencies hollowed out and weakened for years to come.