Thomas Catenacci of the Washington Free Beacon documents the skewed priorities of federal environmental officials during the Biden administration.
Biden-era Environmental Protection Agency employees spent work hours implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion policies throughout the agency—focusing in particular on “de-gendering” bathrooms, hiring more gay and transgender employees, and introducing new gender-neutral honorifics such as “Mx.,” according to internal agency documents and communications reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
Under the leadership of then-EPA administrator Michael Regan, in 2021, the agency created an employee-led “DEIA implementation team” that was empowered to establish workgroups and take DEI-related actions. The goal, according to the Biden EPA, was to “embed” DEI agency-wide, create “cultural change,” and establish the agency as a DEI model for the entire federal government.
The EPA documents—which were first obtained by the watchdog group Functional Government Initiative and shared with the Free Beacon—show the EPA’s DEI initiatives were largely coordinated by its LGBTQIA+ Workgroup, which reported to senior leadership. The workgroup’s members included a scientist, environmental protection specialist, engineer, plant pathologist, climate policy analyst, attorney adviser, and research ethicist among others.
The documents are the latest evidence of how ingrained DEI efforts were at the EPA and across the entire Biden administration. President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign took aim at such efforts and, on his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order dismantling all existing taxpayer-funded DEI initiatives and DEI offices. “The public release of these plans demonstrated immense public waste and shameful discrimination,” the order stated.
The agency’s DEI initiatives likely cost taxpayers millions of dollars in man-hours. The average EPA employee’s annual salary is $102,489, 42.9 percent higher than the national average for government employees, while officials known to have been involved in the initiatives were paid as much as $168,400, according to Open Payrolls.
