Washington, DC–(ENEWSPF)–December 13, 2016
Current Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz with John Kerry during Iranian nuclear negotiations. Because that’s also something Rick Freaking Perry will have to take on.
There may come a day when Donald J. Trump’s whims are the supreme law of the land, but today is not that day. Responding to Trump’s transition team requests for a list of department employees who have worked on climate change-related projects or attended climate change-related meetings, the Energy Department is telling their new boss to get bent.
Energy officials resolutely rejected the request, while reassuring workers. […]“We will be forthcoming with all publically-available information with the transition team. We will not be providing any individual names to the transition team.” Burnham-Snyder’s email had the last sentence in boldface for emphasis.
While Trump doesn’t have the power to fire individual federal employees whose work touched on climate change, he will have the power to make their jobs intolerable in myriad other ways. The department’s email to employees notes the “significant feedback from our workforce” disapproving of the (insane, autocratic) notion: “We are going to respect the professional and scientific integrity and independence of our employees at our labs and across our department.”
We might imagine that Rick Perry, the former Texas governor who during his own presidential run famously could not remember the Department of Energy as the third federal department he was promising to close, was picked as the next head of the department despite his absolute lack of competence on scientific or nuclear research issues because the Trump team is so single-mindedly obsessed with retaliating against climate change laws and researchers that they are willing to cripple all other concerns in service to that retaliation.
The Trump transition team appears to have a conspiratorial notion of what the Department of Energy is and what it does, and they appear to be acting on those conspiratorial notions. It will be interesting to see Rick Perry explain his own selection for the post. It will also be interesting to see how Trump reacts to federal employees pointing out the limits of his own presidential powers.
Source: http://dailykos.com
