A recent headline in the LA Times reads, “At Trump’s EPA, going to work can be an act of defiance.” The article focuses on complaints from Environmental Protection Agency employees who find themselves in a state of despair “with morale plummeting … since President Trump took office.” Evidently, numerous employees at the agency have been calling former EPA California regional office director Jared Blumenfeld looking to find work elsewhere. Blumenfeld says, “The number one call I get everyday is, ‘Jared, can you help us find work somewhere else?’” There were also reports surfacing days after Trump’s inauguration of EPA employees “coming to work in tears.”

Experiencing a change in management can be challenging, but juxtaposed to distress experienced by many Americans who have been abused by the EPA’s unchecked power it quite simply doesn’t even compare.

Trump’s agenda is to cut the bloated bureaucracy down to size and challenge what has become an increasingly leftist bent within the agency. That could downsize the agency’s workforce by some 3,000. No one likes to lose their job, but how many thousands of Americans have lost their jobs due to the EPA’s heavy-handed unilateral action in the creation of oppressive business killing regulations under the dubious guise of fighting climate change? Or what about the litany of individuals who have lost their property rights due to the EPA’s action in declaring their private property to be protected lands? That’s followed by steep fines should property owners dare to engage in responsible use and development of their own land. The EPA complains of Trump being opposed to “science,” but in reality it is the EPA that has increasingly favored politically leftist pseudo-scientific policy over and against sound-scientific practice and policy. The agency has routinely hidden its research findings while continuing to press for increasingly burdensome “environmentally friendly” regulations.

The EPA has been the schoolyard bully for far too long and with Trump effectively hitting the agency in its proverbial nose, its career bureaucrats now seek sympathy as they sit and cry about how unfair life is.