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  In the end, the bill looked very much like the typical tax bill that Mark Meadows described at the Americans for Prosperity event in August. It primarily benefited the highest earners and the best connected. The richest 20 percent of Americans got 65.3 percent of the value of the tax cuts. Middle-income Americans got zero benefit from the tax cuts after their temporary cuts expired.

  Starting in 2027, the biggest tax breaks under the plan would go to the richest 5 percent of Americans, while taxes would slightly increase for the poorest Americans, according to an analysis of the cuts by the Tax Policy Center. Using a number of assumptions about the profit margins at Koch Industries, a liberal policy group called Americans for Tax Fairness estimated that the tax cuts would save David and Charles Koch more than $1 billion annually in taxes.

  By the summer of 2017, Koch’s block-and-tackle strategy was paying dividends. Koch had proved its power in the Obamacare fight, and had reshaped the tax reform legislation from a Trumpian bill to a Koch bill. With these victories in hand, the Koch network could turn to a more helpful role. As it turned out, the Trump administration and the Koch network shared one important goal. Both groups wanted to ensure that greenhouse gases were not regulated in any way, and that the fossil fuel industry would retain its predominant role in America’s energy system. Koch Industries had a knack for positioning itself to exploit good luck, and Donald Trump’s election proved extraordinarily lucky in this regard. Trump waged a war on climate change regulation across the federal government, from the US Department of Agriculture to NASA and the Pentagon. Koch Industries was on hand to assist the effort.

  Ground zero for the fight happened to be the headquarters of an agency that had antagonized Koch Industries for decades—the EPA.

  * * *

  When the Trump administration’s transition team arrived at EPA headquarters, the transition officials described their effort in military terms. After the election, Trump sent a self-described “landing team” of transition officials to the EPA. They were followed by a “beachhead team” of twelve officials who would assume control of the agency. The officials in the beachhead team were designated as “Wave 1,” suggesting that backup forces might be arriving behind them.

  Before the invasion, however, there had been silence. The career employees of the EPA expected a team of Trump officials to arrive the day after the election, which was standard procedure. But no one arrived. On the second day, no one arrived. At the end of the first week, no one had shown up. And it wasn’t at all clear who would be arriving or when. The EPA career staffers, like soldiers on an empty beach, waited in silence for the landing team.

  Then, on November 22, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, the first member of the Trump transition team arrived at EPA headquarters in downtown Washington, DC. He was an older man with graying hair, congenial and talkative. His name was Myron Ebell, and much of his adult life seemed aimed squarely at destroying the EPA.

  Ebell was a senior scholar with a DC think tank called the Competitive Enterprise Institute, funded by Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, and other corporations. The CEI, as it was called, was libertarian and studied the growing burden of the federal government. The think tank put out a popular annual report, called “Ten Thousand Commandments,” one of the few reliable sources that tracked the steady creation of new federal rules and their costs for the private sector. Ebell earned a name for himself as a leading intellectual opponent not just of the EPA, but of any regulations that might constrain carbon emissions and the use of fossil fuels. He was a key voice in Washington to cast doubt on the reality of human-created climate change and what he called “global warming alarmism” a new religion. He said in 2012 that the consensus around climate change was a political consensus, not a scientific consensus.

  By 2016, Ebell had acknowledged that human activity was causing climate change, but he told the Climatewire news service that holding this belief didn’t mean that climate change was “a serious problem or that the policies to address it will actually do anything or that you are willing to pay the costs of those policies.”

  Needless to say, this put Ebell directly at odds with the career staff at the EPA. After Congress failed to pass the cap-and-trade bill in 2010, the effort to regulate greenhouse gas emissions quietly moved into the EPA headquarters. The same team of people who had toiled with Jonathan Phillips in the basement of the Longworth Building—namely, Joel Beauvais, Michael Goo, and Shannon Kenny—moved straight to the EPA to continue the effort there. The team quickly realized that the EPA’s authority to do anything was limited. Only Congress could pass the type of sweeping legislation that could significantly curtail carbon emissions. But this limitation was counterbalanced by good news. The fracking boom had replaced coal-fired power plants with natural gas–fired power plants, reducing America’s carbon emissions. The economics of cheap natural gas essentially doomed coal as a major energy source. But the EPA team, including Beauvais and Goo, took a “rear-guard action” to ensure that coal wouldn’t make a comeback and boost carbon emissions again. This rear-guard action took the form of an EPA rule called the Clean Power Plan, which required states to meet targets for cutting back carbon emissions for power plants. The rule aimed to cut emissions by about one-third by the year 2030, compared with 2005 levels. The Clean Power Plan was only part of the EPA’s effort to limit carbon emissions. On an upper floor of the agency’s headquarters was the home office of the Climate Change Division, a sprawling office of cubicles where the agency collected data on greenhouse gas emissions that were a vital tool in controlling them.

  When Myron Ebell finally arrived at the EPA, he was greeted by two senior EPA officials who sat down with him to discuss how the Trump team might lead the EPA. The officials were Matt Fritz and Shannon Kenny, who were tasked with helping the transition. Ebell was an unremarkable-looking man, with the manner of a soft-spoken college professor. He wore round-framed, deeply unstylish eyeglasses with conservative suits and neckties. He was almost overly polite, even courtly, like an English gentleman who would never say anything to offend. This didn’t mean that his charm won over the EPA officials. The career officials developed a nickname for him—“Creepy Grandpa”—that reflected both their disdain and mistrust.

  It appeared, at least in the eyes of EPA officials, that the disdain ran both ways. As the weeks wore on and Ebell interacted with more EPA employees, he remained strenuously cordial, but they perceived that he was almost gleeful about what was to come. “He was always very polite, but he has this sort of sadistic grin,” one employee recalled. “He wants to be sure that you know he knows he’s fucking you over.”

  * * *

  When Donald Trump arrived in Washington, he had no connections and no political network from which to draw the hundreds of people he needed to staff positions across different government agencies. Charles Koch, by contrast, had spent forty years building political networks in Washington. He had cultivated experts and operatives through years of employing them at think tanks, lobbying offices, and funded university chairs. When Donald Trump went out to hire people, he almost necessarily hired people who were sympathetic to Charles Koch’s point of view, if not directly beholden to Charles Koch’s largesse.

  This influence was apparent in the beachhead team that arrived at the EPA. The team wasn’t selected by Koch, but it was stacked with people who understood Koch and sympathized with it. Myron Ebell was the most obvious connection, but not the only one. There was also Charles Munoz, the beachhead team’s White House liaison, who helped organize the Nevada chapter of Americans for Prosperity. There was David Kreutzer, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, which was funded in part by Koch Industries. There was Justin Schwab, an attorney who would help craft EPA legal doctrine; he was previously an attorney at the firm BakerHostetler, where one of his clients was Big River Steel, of which Koch Industries was the majority stakeholder.

  One of the most significant members of the beachhead team was David Schnare. He was a former
EPA employee of more than thirty years who had left the agency to teach law and work for the Energy & Environment Legal Institute, which was funded in part by the Donors Trust, a group that was funded in part by the Koch network.

  Schnare was an imposing presence, both physically and personally. He had a silver goatee and a deep voice and his sentences were honed with lawyerly precision. He also had a deep knowledge of the EPA and the workings of power in Washington. His job was to write a detailed plan for the Trump administration to carry out its campaign promises at the EPA. It became clear, very quickly, that the plan was not to run the agency in the tradition of previous administrations. Someone “in authority, said to me: ‘You have to come up with a plan to get rid of it,’ ” Schnare recalled. In this case, “it” was the entire EPA. “And I said: ‘You can’t do that. There are laws and all, you know. [EPA] can’t just go away,’ ” Schnare said. His boss was not moved. “They went: ‘Read my lips. You have to come up with a plan to get rid of it.’ ”

  So Schnare came up with a plan to get rid of it. He estimated that the entire agency could be cut up into component parts and its functions handed over to other agencies or abandoned altogether. This could be completed by the sixth year of the Trump administration. It couldn’t happen fast, but it could happen.

  The beachhead team moved into the north building of the EPA headquarters, a stately, stone office building built during the New Deal era, just south of the White House off Pennsylvania Avenue. The building was shaped in a semicircle, embracing a stone courtyard full of picnic tables where office workers with lanyards around their necks ate lunch while packs of sightseers walked past, many of them, in the early winter of 2017, wearing red “Make America Great Again” baseball hats. Inside the front door, the EPA lobby was majestic and full of echoes, like a giant bank lobby, with marble floors and stone walls and hallways with vaulted ceilings. A large spiral staircase, with bannisters of wrought iron emblazoned with ornate designs, led from the lobby up to the third floor, which housed the agency’s executive offices.

  David Schnare’s office was on this floor, near the administrator’s office. This was where he worked on the detailed transition plan. Schnare’s plan was revealing in what it emphasized. The EPA imposed burdens on American businesses both large and small. Its many rules affected farmers, small business owners, and midsized manufacturers, and all of them complained about regulations over dust pollution, cleanup efforts at Superfund sites, and other matters. But the Trump team’s priority was not attacking or changing these rules. The priority was focused, almost entirely, on rules that were a burden for the fossil fuel industry.

  A copy of Schnare’s forty-seven-page transition plan, entitled “Agency Action Plan,” began with an overview of the agency. The next heading was “Priority Change Initiatives.” The first priority for change read: “STOP. Obama climate agenda, including Clear Act greenhouse gas regulations for new (NSPS) and existing (ESPS, or the “Clean Power” Plan) coal and natural gas power plants, CAFE Standards, Methane rules and others.” These priorities could accurately be called Koch Industries’ top priorities. The CAFE standards, for example, referred to the federal fuel efficiency mandates that reduced demand for gasoline. The Clean Power Plan was the closest thing to carbon regulation that the Obama administration had been able to achieve.

  The plan then listed a timeline for change. The first item on the timeline read: “Day One—Issue directives to comply with Executive Orders to rescind climate change directives, including greenhouse gas emissions rules for new and existing power plants, suspend for review (withdraw from OMB) all major final rules that have not been published. . . .” The focus on eliminating climate change rules came from a simple source—Donald Trump’s campaign speeches. “Myron Ebell always said, ‘Go look at the president’s speeches and the president’s website . . . that’s the basis for what we put together in the transition plan,” Schnare recalled.

  It is difficult to pinpoint the source of Donald Trump’s driving fixation with fighting climate change regulation. The fixation was apparent in his campaign speeches, and then in his administration’s actions across virtually every federal department. From the USDA to the Departments of Energy and Interior and the EPA, a mandate was handed down to roll back climate change efforts.

  One plausible explanation of Trump’s fixation was that he responded to the political realities of the modern Republican voting base. If Trump had a genius, it was the genius of reading a crowd and telling people what they wanted to hear, even before they knew they wanted to hear it. He had a sensitive radar for applause lines, and he built on the lines that worked the best. In this way, Trump’s focus on denying the reality of climate change could be seen as an echo of Koch Industries’ years of work to politicize the issue by casting doubt on the science and portraying carbon emission rules as a government conspiracy against liberty. The politics that Koch stoked in 2010 became the policies that Trump enacted in 2017.

  The new EPA administrator would carry out these policies. To fill that role, Trump selected Scott Pruitt, the attorney general of Oklahoma, where oil interests dominated the political landscape. A number of Koch funded groups signed an open letter to US Senators, urging that they confirm Pruitt. Pruitt won confirmation with a vote of 52 to 46. Only one Republican senator, Susan Collins of Maine, voted against him.V

  Pruitt arrived for work in the spring of 2017. One of the first people Pruitt met when he arrived at EPA headquarters was David Schnare. “I met him at the door,” Schnare said. “I handed him a book, which contained all the statutes that EPA has to implement. It’s about three, three and a half, inches thick. And I said: ‘Welcome aboard, sir, here’s the operating manual.’ ”

  The gift was more than a good-hearted joke. It was also a warning. Schnare knew Pruitt’s job was to dismantle the EPA. But dismantling the agency wouldn’t be as easy as Trump might have suggested on the campaign trail.

  * * *

  Almost immediately after he arrived in his new office at EPA headquarters, Scott Pruitt apparently became convinced that a lot of people inside and outside the building wanted to kill him.

  He requested that a security guard be posted outside his office door, behind a bulletproof desk. The desk would presumably act as a barricade if someone came in the office shooting. Pruitt also requested a bulletproof SUV for his personal transport, complete with bulletproof seats. He dramatically expanded the size of his security detail, building a team that could protect him around the clock. He swept the administrator’s office for listening devices and ordered the EPA security department to build a soundproof booth inside his office, where he could make phone calls outside the hearing of career EPA staffers, at a cost to taxpayers of $43,000.

  It was common for new EPA administrators to hold town hall meetings with the career EPA staff to meet the team and lay out priorities. But Pruitt rarely interacted with any staff members, including senior staffers. He became something of a curious figure inside the EPA. He rarely saw the staffers, rarely talked to them, and when he did pass employees in the hallway, the effect was sometimes off-putting. He said hello, cheerfully, and quoted Bible scripture without solicitation or apparent relevance to the situation. In one instance, Pruitt recited a long quote about toiling in the fields, which left staffers wondering what he meant. Two staffers suspected the quote was from the Old Testament, but they weren’t brushed up on their Scripture and couldn’t confirm it. One day, word raced through the office that Pruitt was making a rare public appearance and standing by a bank of elevators, handing long-stemmed roses to women as they arrived for work, for reasons that were unclear.

  While Pruitt’s personality was a puzzle, his policy stances were well known. When he became attorney general of Oklahoma, Pruitt was extraordinarily close to the state’s fossil fuel companies. In 2011, lawyers with Devon Energy drafted a letter complaining to the EPA about air pollution regulations. Pruitt pasted the letter onto an official state document with the official seal of
the state’s attorney general and sent it to the EPA. After Pruitt sent the letter, a Devon lobbyist named William F. Whitsitt sent Pruitt an e-mail that said: “Outstanding!” Devon Energy’s involvement in sending the letter was not made public until 2014, when it was uncovered by New York Times reporter Eric Lipton. This was one example among many.

  Pruitt’s political career had been carefully nurtured in Oklahoma’s political culture. But when he arrived in Washington, it seemed that he wasn’t prepared for what awaited him. He was particularly unsuited to deal with criticism. In the spring of 2017, Pruitt attended a conference at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC, hosted by the Environmental Council of the States, or ECOS, a nonprofit group representing state-level environmental regulators. Two protestors attended the event. They were women, carrying baskets of oranges with stickers on them, highlighting the use of a pesticide called chlorpyrifos. Pruitt’s administration had recently allowed the pesticide’s continued use, even though it was shown to harm human health. The women shouted, and were led out of the conference hall. This was standard fare in Washington, where Senate hearings were often staffed by protestors in wait.

  When he returned to EPA headquarters, however, Pruitt seemed deeply shaken by the women with the oranges. During a meeting in his office on an unrelated topic, Pruitt kept returning to the protestors and the threat they posed to him. He seemed to suggest that the conference organizers were complicit in letting the protestors in the building.