Last Friday, the transition team of President-elect Donald Trump named eight new officials to positions at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and U.S. Department of the Interior, according to Bloomberg’s Bureau of National Affairs.
The three new additions to DOE include two former officials who served under President George W. Bush, Mark Maddox and William Greene. Maddox currently works for a lobbying firm and focuses on energy and natural resources. Joining them is Daniel Simmons, current VP for policy at the Charles Koch-founded Institute for Energy Research (IER), who formerly worked for the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
The Trump team’s lining of DOE with fossil fuel proponents comes as his transition team leader, Thomas Pyle (who heads IER) is trying and failing to get the DOE to report the names of employees and contractors who worked on renewable energy and Climate Change issues.
And while the team fills DOE with tools of the Koch Brothers, it is also filling EPA with those who have actively resisted action on Climate Change. Harlan Watson was a climate negotiator under the administration of president George W. Bush, starting in the period where the United States withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol.
Watson will be joined by Christopher Horner, a senior fellow with the “free-market” think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), which smeared and attacked decorated climate scientist Michael Mann during a fabricated scandal over climate data.
Finally, the transition team has appointed lawyer and Wyoming ranch owner Karen Budd-Falen, who worked at the Department of the Interior under Reagan, to return to the department. He will be joined by Ned Mamula, who advocates for greater oil and gas extraction at the right-wing Cato Institute, and Mary Bomar, who directed the National Park Service under George W. Bush.
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