FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 30, 2024
CONTACT:
Steven Fantes, Public Affairs Manager
617-817-1297 and epn-press@environmentalprotectionnetwork.org
New Videos Surface of Trump’s Former OMB Director Calling for “Traumatizing” EPA Staff
Russell Vought, former director of the Office of Management and Budget under the Trump administration, expressed plans to put career civil servants “in trauma” under a second Trump administration.
“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in the videos obtained by ProPublica.“When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.”
In response, Environmental Protection Network (EPN) Executive Director Michelle Roos said, “This is a chilling revelation of how far political operatives will go to demonize staff at EPA. Trying to harm government employees to serve a politically driven agenda is morally offensive.”
In a recent op-ed for EPN, former EPA administrators Christine Todd Whitman and Carol M. Browner pushed back against Project 2025, citing its devastating impact on the EPA.
“Given the profound damage done to the EPA under President Trump during his first term, it’s hard to envision things being worse. Yet, it’s possible,” Whitman and Browner wrote. “Project 2025 would render the agency unable to achieve vital objectives and it will roll back almost all of the progress of the last three years. We cannot go back.”
EPN Senior Advisor Jeremy Symons is available to speak with the media about Project 2025 and its impact on the EPA and government employees.
About Jeremy Symons: Jeremy Symons is Principal of Symons Public Affairs and a Senior Advisor for the Environmental Protection Network. He is a former Climate Policy Advisor for EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation.