If any Republican thought the war ended on November 5th, they are in for a rude awakening. It’s probably more realistic to say that Donald Trump winning the election was just the first battle. Now, the entrenched bureaucracy will seek to protect itself at all costs, and officials at The Department of Health and Human Services are already hard at work.
According to a new report, members of the “Office of Climate Change and Health Equity” are shifting responsibilities to more protected employees and seeking to codify their work away from the pesky reach of elected officials. If that sounds authoritarian, that’s because it is.
Adding to the uncertainty is Trump’s decision to nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental litigator turned vaccine skeptic, to head HHS.
The department has nonetheless taken steps to hardwire the climate office’s work into the agency. It required senior executive service employees — which have the strongest protections against removal among career federal staff — to ensure the climate literacy of their staff. HHS has since created a climate training module for all employees.
Asked whether that will be in the employee manual in 2025, Balbus said: “It will be there.”
It is deeply undemocratic to have government agencies above the reproach of voters. That’s what’s happening here, though, and these bureaucrats are proud of what they are doing. That should make everyone angry. Deeply entrenched government employees are essentially running the government, able to use machinations to ensure the will of the people is ignored.
This is why Trump has to make tearing down the bureaucratic state his top priority. Nothing else will have a more long-lasting impact than that. The Supreme Court’s recent decision to nuke the Chevron Doctrine, which protected these agencies, provides the necessary tools.
SEE: Supreme Court Makes Monumental Ruling on Chevron Deference
As to the rationalization these officials and their press allies are running with, they claim that “climate change” is affecting health systems, making their work worthy of being untouchable.
Trump’s victory in the Nov. 5 election came as climate damage is piling up for the health care sector, for example when Hurricane Helene inundated Unicoi County Hospital in Tennessee this fall. Ingraining climate change into the broader health-care sector’s thinking has been “slow,” but director John Balbus said his office is making steady progress.
“Health systems are recognizing that this is a business issue, this is a financial risk issue, that it’s a threat to the mission and operations, and that message is just starting to get out,” he told reporters Monday in Baku, Azerbaijan, at the COP29 global climate summit. He was at the summit to discuss the administration’s efforts to address the health impacts of climate change.
I guess we are just going to call every weather event “climate change” despite hurricanes existing for the entire duration of history. It seems to be an easy way for bureaucrats to gather funding and power when the actual answer is to just assist when needed on a case-by-case basis. No government agency is going to stop hurricanes or any other weather phenomenon from occurring.
Yet Trump represents a threat to many of the initiatives Balbus’ office has touted because they rely on the Inflation Reduction Act, which Trump has vowed to reverse. Biden’s climate law has supplied key funding for health-care and hospital systems to improve their defense against the effects of climate change, particularly through direct payments supported by Treasury Department tax credits, Balbus said.
Notice how vague all that language is and then realize that’s the point. What is meant by “improving their defense” there? Those kinds of details are never really provided because these are simply giveaway programs to special interests funded by already-strapped taxpayers.
Whatever improvement in “defense” is being carried out by healthcare and hospital systems isn’t necessitated by climate change. It’s necessitated by weather events that have always happened and will continue to happen. So why exactly does the already bloated federal government need yet another middle-man sucking up resources? Congress could easily appropriate money for generators, for example, if needed. There doesn’t need to be an “Office of Climate Change and Health Equity.”
And to be sure, the “equity” part of that means what it always means: The government picking winners and losers based on perceived “oppression.” It’s time for all of this to stop, but it’s not going to happen overnight. This will be a pro-longed war with lots of pitfalls along the way. I hope Republicans are up for it because with the House likely to flip in 2026, time is already running short.
