Days before he is set to take office, Joe Biden is setting up a bigger White House climate team than any president before him. As Juliet Eilperin and I report, the president-elect announced the planned hiring of more than a half-dozen new climate staffers to join his West Wing. The crew is drawn from the ranks of green groups, environmental justice advocates and former Democratic administration officials to grow an inner circle that will help him try to slash the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions.
And outside the White House, Biden plans to add one of the architects of Obama’s plan for cutting emissions from the power sector to the Environmental Protection Agency, a sign of more environmental regulation to come.
Former vice president Joe Biden walks past solar panels in Plymouth, N.H., in 2019. (Reuters/Brian Snyder)
That team will be tasked with executing a wide-reaching plan to embed climate action across government agencies and in legislation on Capitol Hill. Biden has also pledged to address the disproportionate pollution burden carried by poor and minority neighborhoods. Biden’s incoming climate team is a mix of new faces and old hands.
The hires announced Thursday include David J. Hayes, who served as Interior deputy secretary under both Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and will now be a special assistant to the president for climate policy.
Hayes spearheaded Interior’s renewable energy development plans and its efforts to address climate change impacts in the Arctic under Obama, before joining the New York School of Law’s State Energy and Environmental Impact Center. From that perch, he helped organize several legal challenges by Democratic attorneys general to the Trump administration’s deregulatory agenda.
