Biden-era Environmental Protection Agency employees spent work hours implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion policies throughout the agency—focusing in particular on "de-gendering" bathrooms, hiring more gay and transgender employees, and introducing new gender-neutral honorifics such as "Mx.," according to internal agency documents and communications reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
Under the leadership of then-EPA administrator Michael Regan, in 2021, the agency created an employee-led "DEIA implementation team" that was empowered to establish workgroups and take DEI-related actions. The goal, according to the Biden EPA, was to "embed" DEI agency-wide, create "cultural change," and establish the agency as a DEI model for the entire federal government.
The EPA documents—which were first obtained by the watchdog group Functional Government Initiative and shared with the Free Beacon—show the EPA's DEI initiatives were largely coordinated by its LGBTQIA+ Workgroup, which reported to senior leadership. The workgroup's members included a scientist, environmental protection specialist, engineer, plant pathologist, climate policy analyst, attorney adviser, and research ethicist among others.
The documents are the latest evidence of how ingrained DEI efforts were at the EPA and across the entire Biden administration. President Donald Trump's 2024 campaign took aim at such efforts and, on his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order dismantling all existing taxpayer-funded DEI initiatives and DEI offices. "The public release of these plans demonstrated immense public waste and shameful discrimination," the order stated.
The agency's DEI initiatives likely cost taxpayers millions of dollars in man-hours. The average EPA employee's annual salary is $102,489, 42.9 percent higher than the national average for government employees, while officials known to have been involved in the initiatives were paid as much as $168,400, according to Open Payrolls.
"In the Biden years, Americans endured crisis after crisis, many of them—rampant illegal immigration, draconian COVID-19 measures, and skyrocketing fuel costs—of the president's own making," the Functional Government Initiative told the Free Beacon. "What was the administration instead focused on? A phony crisis of inequity, racism, and ‘transphobia,’ which could only be met by wasting vast resources on un-American, divisive initiatives."
"Unfortunately, the EPA wasn’t alone: the rot grew across the federal government with the encouragement of the administration," it added. "This was not presidential leadership, but rather government dysfunction."
The EPA's LGBTQIA+ Workgroup, meanwhile, outlined its DEI-related activities during a summit in September 2023 hosted by the left-wing group Out and Equal.
According to slides of its presentation reviewed by the Free Beacon, the group's top recommendations for the EPA were to "de-gender" restroom and locker room access, increase participation in voluntary self-disclosure of sexual orientation and gender identity, incorporate LGBTQIA+ prospective employees into recruiting activities, add gender pronouns on email signatures, and change internal style manual requirements for gendered honorifics.
The workgroup noted in the presentation that it met weekly to craft its recommendations and that it informed EPA leaders in 2023 that it would not sunset as originally planned, and would continue meeting.
And the group achieved many of its objectives: Across the EPA's 118 facilities, the group said the agency's number of gender-neutral restrooms and gender-neutral locker rooms swelled to 140 and 15, respectively, as a result of its work. The Biden EPA also committed to constructing all-gender restrooms in future building renovations, continuing to retrofit existing restrooms, and replacing male/female signage on existing single-use restrooms with signs that are more inclusive.
The EPA workgroup added that, if it felt internal resistance to the changes, it would "educate contractors and EPA employees on why these changes are needed."
In addition, because of the workgroup's advocacy, the EPA added pronouns to emails, targeted specific offices where people were "misgendered" with expanded trainings, and issued an October 2023 memorandum authored by then-deputy administrator Janet McCabe allowing employees to select their preferred honorifics such as "Mx." instead of "Mr." or "Mrs."
"This update also includes some very important improvements that will help advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in our writing," McCabe wrote in the memorandum.
Since Trump took office, however, the EPA has gutted DEI and related environmental justice activities. Administrator Lee Zeldin, for example, has announced that the agency has canceled millions of dollars in DEI spending and placed 171 DEI and environmental justice employees on administrative leave.
"The previous Administration used DEI and environmental justice to advance ideological priorities, distributing billions of dollars to organizations in the name of climate equity. This ends now," Zeldin said last month. "We will be good stewards of tax dollars and do everything in our power to deliver clean air, land, and water to every American, regardless of race, religion, background, and creed."