Remember when President Donald Trump told the Environmental Protection Agency to remove the webpage on climate change and it said “sure” and complied? Nor do we. Because the EPA, National Parks Service and NASA have gone rogue.
Twitter accounts AltEPA (@ActualEPAFacts), AltUSNatPArkService (@AltNatParkSer) and AltNASA (@Alt_NASA) have popped up as “unofficial resistance” accounts with AltEPA declaring “He can take our official Twitter but he’ll never take our FREEDOM.” The White House denied on Wednesday that the new Trump administration ordered a curb on the flow of information from several government agencies involved in environmental issues.
“They have not been directed by us to do anything,” White House spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters, adding employees have been told to adhere to their agency’s own policies. “But that directive did not come from here.” That isn’t stopping the resistance.
The accounts are purportedly run by employees of the federal agencies who are fighting back against Trump’s environmental policy changes. AltEPA started a “voices from the EPA” series with quotes from anonymous employees. The number behind the quotes denotes the number of years the employee has served with the EPA, according to the account. A 10-year employee said:”We’ve done a lot of good. Contractors didn’t like our lead program. Kids with healthy home did though.” Another employee with a decade of service is concerned about job security after grants and EPA contracts were frozen.
“The panic attacks started on Friday,” the employee said. “I can’t lose my job. I have kids.” And a 22-year veteran of the agency said, “In my world we call ‘alternative facts’ disproved hypotheses,” according to the account. The employees were notified by EPA officials on Tuesday that the administration had instructed EPA’s communications team to remove the website’s climate change page, which contains links to scientific global warming research, as well as detailed data on emissions. “If the website goes dark, years of work we have done on climate change will disappear,” one of the EPA staffers told Reuters, who added some employees were scrambling to save some of the information housed on the website, or convince the Trump administration to preserve parts of it. The sources asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
Reuters contributed to this report.