It appears that Donald Trump’s transition team is backing away from a previous request for a list of names of climate change employees at the Department of Energy.
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The Trump transition team appeared sent the controversial questionnaire to the Energy Department last week asking for the names of department staffers who had worked on several climate-change initiatives under President Obama.
In a statement to the Washington Post Trump’s transition team said, “The questionnaire was not authorized or part of our standard protocol. The person who sent it has been properly counseled.”
After uproar, Trump transition team walks back its controversial climate questionnaire
Last week, Bloomberg reported on a questionnaire that the Trump transition team had sent to the Department of Energy. As part of that questionnaire, Trump’s team wanted a list of every agency employee or contractor who had worked on certain climate issues during the Obama administration:
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Can you provide a list of all Department of Energy employees or contractors who have attended any lnteragency Working Group on the Social Cost of Carbon meetings? Can you provide a list of when those meetings were and any materials distributed at those meetings, EPSA emails associated with those meetings, or materials created by Department employees or contractors in anticipation of or as a result of those meetings?
The Department of Energy refused to comply with the request saying “we will be forthcoming with all publicly available information with the transition team. We will not be providing any individual names to the transition team,” DOE spokesperson Eben Burnham-Snyder told Politico. Adding that the questions from Trump had “left many in our workforce unsettled.”
The reversal appears to be the first acknowledged mistake by the Trump transition team.
Donald Trump and several of his administration openly reject established climate science and Trump famously called climate change a “hoax” perpetrated by the Chinese.
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