Christopher Horner is a Senior Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. On Sunday, The Washington Times reported that President-elect Trump has appointed Mr. Horner to be part of the new administration’s landing team at the Environmental Protection Agency.
The article reports:
Mr. Horner is one of the Trump transition’s “landing teams,” who are deployed to each department and agency to learn about the latest operations and any in-the-works policies, with the goal of a smooth changeover come Jan. 20.
Some agency transitions can be friendly, and others are more hostile. The appointment of Mr. Horner to the nine-member EPA team suggests that will be one of the latter.
It’s an agency he has pursued relentlessly. One notable target was President Obama’s first EPA administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, whom he exposed as using a secret email alias, “Richard Windsor,” to conduct official government business. Soon after that revelation, Ms. Jackson stepped down.
Mr. Horner also has sought to expose what he sees as improper ties between environmentalists and the EPA, unearthing reams of emails showing backdoor communications, including on private email addresses, between agency bigwigs and activists plotting their next joint policy moves.
All of that has been done from the outside, using the powerful but limited Freedom of Information Act to pry loose what he could.
“He’s been looking to get into this bank vault over the years, and finally somebody just opened the door up and let him walk in,” said Michael McKenna, a Republican Party energy strategist and friend of Mr. Horner’s who previously worked on the Trump transition team.
The pigs are already squealing. The article reports:
Landing parties are standard practice in transitions. They are made up of people with interest and knowledge in an agency’s area of practice.
Both sides sign agreements promising confidentiality so neither side can meddle in the other’s plans.
But some operations leak, including a massive questionnaire that the Trump transition sent to the Energy Department.
Among other things, the memo asked for names of staffers who worked on global warming issues at the department. Officials at the department balked at providing those answers, and the White House backed them up, saying it appeared the Trump team was targeting career employees for doing their jobs.
The questionnaire was trying to find out who worked on “social cost of carbon” issues. That’s an Obama policy that declares global warming to be of such a magnitude that prognostications of its effects on other parts of society can be used to justify new government regulations.
A group of Democratic senators on Friday demanded an ethics inquiry into the questionnaire.
Are these the same Democrats that did everything they could to thwart the inquiries into the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups? Sorry, guys, I just can’t take you seriously anymore.
Keep in mind what the goal of the global warming types is–government control of almost every area of our lives–in some states it is already illegal to collect rainwater that falls on your own property! The science is not settled–it never has been. We already know that many of the researchers lied about their data (remember the University of East Anglia–if you don’t, here is the story). The predictions of global warming are based on computer models that have a very spotty track record at best. Putting Mr. Horner in the EPA might bring reliability and honesty to what is going on there. We might actually get regulations based on real facts.