John Kerry a Potential Pick to Lead Biden's Climate Team

President-elect Joe Biden has stocked his transition team with policy experts, academics and former Obama administration officials, a contrast with the industry-friendly figures President Donald Trump sent into the government upon winning office.

The roughly 500-person group Biden’s campaign announced on Monday will prepare federal agencies for the incoming administration and draft plans to overhaul their operations after four years under Trump. The president-elect’s team includes people who favor stronger government regulation than Trump -- particularly for the financial and energy sectors -- and greater consumer protections.

Four years ago, Trump stocked his so-called agency “landing teams” with conservatives from think tanks and advocacy groups -- including people who had been openly hostile to the agencies they were charged to review. It foreshadowed an aggressive rollback of regulations under Trump’s watch.

Biden has taken a notably different tack with what he calls “agency review teams,” though some liberals have raised concerns about the participation of executives from companies, including Amazon.com Inc., Uber Technologies Inc., Lyft Inc. and Airbnb Inc.

The groups of advisers that enter federal agencies ahead of Inauguration Day are a hallmark of presidential transitions, but their influence only goes so far. After the 2016 transition, some Trump “landing team” officials later complained their policy recommendations were ignored.

And in Biden’s case, they may not have much time to work. They cannot access office space or begin closely working with government officials until the administrator of the General Services Administration, Emily Murphy, issues a finding that Biden is the incoming president. She has so far declined to do so as Trump fights the election results in several states and insists, falsely, that he won.

Biden says that won’t prevent his transition officials from beginning their planning.

Biden’s energy- and environment-focused transition teams feature a host of former Obama administration officials as well as some activists from advocacy groups.

The president-elect’s Environmental Protection Agency landing team draws heavily from veterans who served under former President Barack Obama, including former chief of staff Matt Fritz and enforcement head Cynthia Giles, climate adviser Joseph Goffman and former top water official Ken Kopocis. The head of the EPA team is Patrice Simms, a former agency lawyer who now serves as a vice president of Earthjustice, a group known for challenging federal environmental policy decisions.

By contrast, Trump’s EPA transition team was led by the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Myron Ebell, who accused the agency of relying on “junk science” to justify regulations, is skeptical of humanity’s contribution to climate change and sought a major reduction in agency staffing. Another adviser on Trump’s EPA team, Christopher Horner, had spent years relentlessly seeking agency emails, texts and other documents, even unearthing former administrator Lisa Jackson’s reliance on an alias account.

Arun Majumdar, a Stanford University professor who was Obama’s founding director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, is leading Biden’s Energy Department transition team. During his time in government, the agency funded experimental research projects on flying wind turbines and enzyme-based carbon capture technology. Majumdar is on the short list to be Biden’s Energy secretary, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The head of Trump’s Energy Department team was Tom Pyle, president of the non-profit American Energy Alliance, which has combatted government efforts to subsidize clean energy.

Shortly after they arrived at the Energy Department in 2016, Trump’s advisers delivered a lengthy questionnaire to Obama officials, seeking to root out the names of employees and contractors involved in climate policy and negotiations. The effort unsettled agency staff, and Democrats cast it as a witch hunt.

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