In late 2020, we asked “will the Environmental Protection Agency work only for progressive presidents?” In that post, we described the stark contrast in managerial ease for political appointees at the EPA during the Obama and Trump administrations.

For Obama, EPA employees worked tirelessly to cement the president’s environmental legacy. During the Trump administration, however, there was “open staff resistance” to the president’s agenda, to borrow phrasing from the New York Times. These contrasting work ethics prompted our concern that the staff had its own agenda.

Such concerns were amplified by a recent article from Bloomberg Law’s Stephen Lee, regarding ongoing negotiations between the EPA’s largest union and political management at the Biden administration. Lee reports:

The EPA’s biggest union, signaling its dissatisfaction with the White House’s level of action on climate, will ask the Biden administration to declare a national climate emergency and take other ambitious steps on the environment.

The declaration of a national emergency would kick-start 123 statutory powers that aren’t otherwise available to the executive branch, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. …

The union, which represents 7,500 of the EPA’s 14,300 employees, also wants the White House to reinstate a crude oil export ban under the National Emergencies Act and Defense Production Act; enact a clean energy standard to decarbonize the power sector by 2035; and impose a moratorium on permitting fossil fuel facilities and infrastructure. …

Other requests include loan guarantees for renewable energy development, carbon emissions reductions at federal agencies, and the decarbonization of federal financial outlays, including the Thrift Savings Plan that provides retirement savings for federal employees.

Lee quoted union leader Nicole Cantello as saying, “At EPA we haven’t seen the level of climate action we want to see … there’s so much more we can do.”

This is a mind-blowing development, one that threatens to turn the civil service system on its head. In our government, constitutional officers (that is, the president’s political appointees) are supposed to wield policymaking discretion. Civil servants are supposed to be apolitical; theirs is not to ask why. This arrangement is based on accountability: while political appointees are accountable to the president, staff at the EPA are insulated from accountability by civil service protections which make it exceedingly difficult to discipline federal employees.

Frankly, it is outrageous that the agency’s staff believes their policymaking proposals are a bargaining chip in labor negotiations. But it’s also outrageous that the staff is champing at the bit to regulate—they’re so gung-ho on climate policy that they’re pushing measures that aren’t even implemented by the EPA, such as the loan guarantees for renewable energy, which come out of the Energy Department. This apparent pro-regulatory bias lends further evidence to our fear that the EPA will work only for progressive presidents.

The staff is playing a dangerous game. If Republicans believe that the EPA is an arm of progressive environmentalism—which, to be fair, seems to be the case—then they will demand a course correction. As well they should. The EPA’s staff is in dire need of a reality check.