Former EPA intern: Trump’s impact ‘impossible to miss’

A former intern at the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) detailed in an op-ed on Wednesday how the impact of the Trump administration’s policies on the agency was “impossible to miss” during her time there. 

“In my work, the impact was impossible to miss. I was helping to communicate the EPA’s goals to the public,” former EPA intern Katie Miller wrote in The Washington Post.

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“And those goals were no longer about putting the environment first, especially if doing so would affect American industries,” she continued. 

Miller discussed how part of her job as an intern was to remove any mention of climate change from social media accounts in the agency, and how she confronted EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt on the issue during a meeting.

Pruitt told Miller he did not think the agency was trying to withhold information from the public, but rather “start a discussion.”

The agency under the Trump administration has drastically rolled back various key Obama-era policies.

Pruitt had a hand in orchestrating Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. from the Paris climate accord, and the administration has moved to end the Clean Power Plan.

A December report from The New York Times and ProPublica noted that the EPA has lost more than 700 employees during the Trump administration, including scientists, specialists and department directors.