Ground zero for the fight happened to be the headquarters of an agency that had antagonized Koch Industries for decades—the EPA.
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When the Trump administration’s transition team arrived at EPA headquarters, the transition officials described their effort in military terms. After the election, Trump sent a self-described “landing team” of transition officials to the EPA. They were followed by a “beachhead team” of twelve officials who would assume control of the agency. The officials in the beachhead team were designated as “Wave 1,” suggesting that backup forces might be arriving behind them.
Before the invasion, however, there had been silence. The career employees of the EPA expected a team of Trump officials to arrive the day after the election, which was standard procedure. But no one arrived. On the second day, no one arrived. At the end of the first week, no one had shown up. And it wasn’t at all clear who would be arriving or when. The EPA career staffers, like soldiers on an empty beach, waited in silence for the landing team.
Then, on November 22, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, the first member of the Trump transition team arrived at EPA headquarters in downtown Washington, DC. He was an older man with graying hair, congenial and talkative. His name was Myron Ebell, and much of his adult life seemed aimed squarely at destroying the EPA.
Ebell was a senior scholar with a DC think tank called the Competitive Enterprise Institute, funded by Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, and other corporations. The CEI, as it was called, was libertarian and studied the growing burden of the federal government. The think tank put out a popular annual report, called “Ten Thousand Commandments,” one of the few reliable sources that tracked the steady creation of new federal rules and their costs for the private sector. Ebell earned a name for himself as a leading intellectual opponent not just of the EPA, but of any regulations that might constrain carbon emissions and the use of fossil fuels. He was a key voice in Washington to cast doubt on the reality of human-created climate change and what he called “global warming alarmism” a new religion. He said in 2012 that the consensus around climate change was a political consensus, not a scientific consensus.
By 2016, Ebell had acknowledged that human activity was causing climate change, but he told the Climatewire news service that holding this belief didn’t mean that climate change was “a serious problem or that the policies to address it will actually do anything or that you are willing to pay the costs of those policies.”
Needless to say, this put Ebell directly at odds with the career staff at the EPA. After Congress failed to pass the cap-and-trade bill in 2010, the effort to regulate greenhouse gas emissions quietly moved into the EPA headquarters. The same team of people who had toiled with Jonathan Phillips in the basement of the Longworth Building—namely, Joel Beauvais, Michael Goo, and Shannon Kenny—moved straight to the EPA to continue the effort there. The team quickly realized that the EPA’s authority to do anything was limited. Only Congress could pass the type of sweeping legislation that could significantly curtail carbon emissions. But this limitation was counterbalanced by good news. The fracking boom had replaced coal-fired power plants with natural gas–fired power plants, reducing America’s carbon emissions. The economics of cheap natural gas essentially doomed coal as a major energy source. But the EPA team, including Beauvais and Goo, took a “rear-guard action” to ensure that coal wouldn’t make a comeback and boost carbon emissions again. This rear-guard action took the form of an EPA rule called the Clean Power Plan, which required states to meet targets for cutting back carbon emissions for power plants. The rule aimed to cut emissions by about one-third by the year 2030, compared with 2005 levels. The Clean Power Plan was only part of the EPA’s effort to limit carbon emissions. On an upper floor of the agency’s headquarters was the home office of the Climate Change Division, a sprawling office of cubicles where the agency collected data on greenhouse gas emissions that were a vital tool in controlling them.
When Myron Ebell finally arrived at the EPA, he was greeted by two senior EPA officials who sat down with him to discuss how the Trump team might lead the EPA. The officials were Matt Fritz and Shannon Kenny, who were tasked with helping the transition. Ebell was an unremarkable-looking man, with the manner of a soft-spoken college professor. He wore round-framed, deeply unstylish eyeglasses with conservative suits and neckties. He was almost overly polite, even courtly, like an English gentleman who would never say anything to offend. This didn’t mean that his charm won over the EPA officials. The career officials developed a nickname for him—“Creepy Grandpa”—that reflected both their disdain and mistrust.
It appeared, at least in the eyes of EPA officials, that the disdain ran both ways. As the weeks wore on and Ebell interacted with more EPA employees, he remained strenuously cordial, but they perceived that he was almost gleeful about what was to come. “He was always very polite, but he has this sort of sadistic grin,” one employee recalled. “He wants to be sure that you know he knows he’s fucking you over.”
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When Donald Trump arrived in Washington, he had no connections and no political network from which to draw the hundreds of people he needed to staff positions across different government agencies. Charles Koch, by contrast, had spent forty years building political networks in Washington. He had cultivated experts and operatives through years of employing them at think tanks, lobbying offices, and funded university chairs. When Donald Trump went out to hire people, he almost necessarily hired people who were sympathetic to Charles Koch’s point of view, if not directly beholden to Charles Koch’s largesse.
This influence was apparent in the beachhead team that arrived at the EPA. The team wasn’t selected by Koch, but it was stacked with people who understood Koch and sympathized with it. Myron Ebell was the most obvious connection, but not the only one. There was also Charles Munoz, the beachhead team’s White House liaison, who helped organize the Nevada chapter of Americans for Prosperity. There was David Kreutzer, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, which was funded in part by Koch Industries. There was Justin Schwab, an attorney who would help craft EPA legal doctrine; he was previously an attorney at the firm BakerHostetler, where one of his clients was Big River Steel, of which Koch Industries was the majority stakeholder.
One of the most significant members of the beachhead team was David Schnare. He was a former EPA employee of more than thirty years who had left the agency to teach law and work for the Energy & Environment Legal Institute, which was funded in part by the Donors Trust, a group that was funded in part by the Koch network.
Schnare was an imposing presence, both physically and personally. He had a silver goatee and a deep voice and his sentences were honed with lawyerly precision. He also had a deep knowledge of the EPA and the workings of power in Washington. His job was to write a detailed plan for the Trump administration to carry out its campaign promises at the EPA. It became clear, very quickly, that the plan was not to run the agency in the tradition of previous administrations. Someone “in authority, said to me: ‘You have to come up with a plan to get rid of it,’ ” Schnare recalled. In this case, “it” was the entire EPA. “And I said: ‘You can’t do that. There are laws and all, you know. [EPA] can’t just go away,’ ” Schnare said. His boss was not moved. “They went: ‘Read my lips. You have to come up with a plan to get rid of it.’ ”