With ready orders and an energy czar, Trump plots pivot to fossil fuels

As President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team plans his energy and environment agenda, it is relying on two seasoned former Cabinet leaders and fossil fuel lobbyists to dramatically reshape the agencies charged with protecting the nation’s air, water, climate and public lands, according to six people familiar with the matter.

The task is familiar to David Bernhardt, a former oil lobbyist who headed the Interior Department in the first Trump administration, and Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist who ran the Environmental Protection Agency. Both are Washington insiders who have years of experience in dismantling federal environmental protections.

People working on the transition have already prepared a slate of executive orders and presidential proclamations on climate and energy. They include withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate agreement, eliminating every office in every agency working to end the pollution that disproportionately affects poor communities, and shrinking the size of national monuments in the West to allow more drilling and mining on public lands.

President Joe Biden has made environmental justice a top priority and has sought to ensure underserved communities benefit from at least 40% of clean energy development. That initiative will be scrapped, people familiar with the plan said. The move will be part of a greater effort to dismantle what Trump’s allies view as the “woke” agenda and any programs that do not help improve the economy.

The boundaries of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in southern Utah will be immediately redrawn to reflect changes that Trump made in 2017, when he opened hundreds of thousands of acres of land considered sacred to several Native tribes to mining and other development. Biden expanded the protected areas in 2021.

Trump is also expected to move swiftly to end the Biden administration’s pause on permitting new natural gas export terminals, and to revoke a long-standing waiver that allows California and other states to set tighter pollution standards than the federal government.

Trump also intends to install an “energy czar” in the White House to coordinate policies across agencies in an effort to cut regulations and make it easier to ramp up production of oil, gas and coal.

Some people on the transition team are discussing moving the EPA headquarters and its 7,000 workers out of Washington, D.C., according to multiple people involved in the discussions who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to talk about the transition.

The “energy czar” job description is reminiscent of the White House Energy Task Force overseen by Vice President Dick Cheney during the George W. Bush administration, designed to ensure fossil fuels would remain the United States’ primary energy resources for “years down the road” and that the federal government’s energy strategy would mainly seek to increase supply of fossil fuels, rather than limit demand.

At the United Nations climate talks last year, the United States and nearly every other country agreed to transition away from fossil fuels, the burning of which is driving climate change.

One possible candidate for the role of energy czar is Gov. Doug Burgum, R-N.D., who briefly ran for his party’s nomination for president last year before dropping out to endorse Trump.

Burgum emerged as a key adviser on energy issues to Trump’s campaign, acting as a liaison between Trump and the oil billionaires who helped fund his presidential bid.

Another potential candidate is Dan Brouillette, a former automobile industry lobbyist who served as energy secretary in the first Trump administration.

A spokesperson for the transition team, Karoline Leavitt, declined to confirm those moves. “President-Elect Trump will begin making decisions on who will serve in his second administration soon,” she said in an email. “Those decisions will be announced when they are made.”

An energy and environment transition team with experience from previous Republican administrations — as well as on Capitol Hill, at lobbying firms and in private business — stands in contrast to the chaos of the first Trump administration’s transition. Eight years ago, some on Trump’s “beachhead” teams lacked a basic understanding of the underlying statutes that guide the agencies charged with protecting the air, water, land and climate.

Those teams made hasty attempts to erase environmental rules that did not stand up to legal challenges. Later in Trump’s term, Bernhardt and Wheeler, who had both served in their respective agencies in previous Republican administrations, stepped in to ensure environmental rollbacks were executed with more legal care.

The model for this transition is Biden, 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 seeks to do the reverse.

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

Bernhardt is playing a leading role. He is working on a broad range of issues including energy, public land use and environmental policy, said the people knowledgeable about the transition.

As it did during the first Trump administration, the Interior Department, which oversees 500 million acres of public lands, will be central to Trump’s vision of unleashing a new era of unfettered oil, gas and coal production.

During his time in the first Trump administration, Bernhardt helped open more than 10 million acres of public lands to fossil fuel extraction and stripped away protections for endangered species.

Bernhardt serves as chair of the Center for American Freedom at the America First Policy Institute, an organization that has spent the past two years crafting policy plans for the next Republican administration. Trump has suggested that Bernhardt would be welcomed back to his administration in almost any role he would like, whether at the Interior Department or the White House.

Bernhardt and the America First Policy Institute did not respond to requests for comment.

Others who are being considered to head the Interior Department in the second Trump administration are Adam Paul Laxalt, former attorney general of Nevada; Sen. Mike Lee of Utah; Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming; and Kate MacGregor, who served as the deputy interior secretary in the first term.

The EPA transition includes Wheeler, who is considered a top choice to lead the agency again. It also includes Anne Austin, who served as the agency’s regional administrator in Texas as well as a deputy in its air office, and Carla Sands, who served as Trump’s ambassador to Denmark and is now a top energy official at the America First Policy Institute.

During Trump’s first term, Wheeler dismantled rules to cut fossil fuel pollution from power plants, automobiles and oil and gas wells, essentially ensuring billions of tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions would continue to heat the atmosphere. The Biden administration restored and expanded those rules.

Wheeler did not respond to a request for comment.

According to people involved in the talks, the transition team is particularly eager to move forward with Trump’s vision of relocating tens of thousands of federal employees, starting at the EPA. Those discussions are in early stages, the people involved said.

During Trump’s first term, the administration moved the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management to Colorado and two scientific research arms of the Department of Agriculture to Kansas, resulting in an exodus of employees.

“Just as I moved the Bureau of Land Management to Colorado, as many as 100,000 government positions could be moved out — and I mean immediately — out of Washington to places filled with patriots who love America,” Trump said in a video on his campaign website.

“This is how I will shatter the deep state,” he said.

Joyce Howell, an EPA attorney in Philadelphia and executive vice president of the AFGE Council 238 representing agency employees, said that most EPA staff already work outside Washington. The EPA has 10 regional offices and dozens of small facilities and labs throughout the United States.

“I don’t know what they think they’re going to accomplish by moving EPA headquarters other than disruption,” Howell said. “The patriots who love America are also in Washington, D.C. You can’t find another group of people more dedicated to protecting public health and the environment.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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