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