This Week: The ‘Suspicious’ Shutdown Of A Military Climate Change Task Force

Navy shuts down climate change task force: “Suspicious” — that’s how retired Navy Rear Adm. Jon White, who used to lead the Navy’s Task Force Climate Change, described the quiet folding of the task force to E&E News recently.

The Navy created the task force in 2009 to shape strategic and policy discussions as climate change shaped global coastlines and impacted military infrastructure. But in March, the task force closed without submitting any kind of culminating report.

A Navy spokesperson told E&E that the task force had become “duplicative as functions have been transitioned to existing business processes” and was therefore no longer needed. Yet, White disagreed, saying there was “little evidence” of such incorporation.

“Across all of [the Department of Defense], it is hard for me to see that climate change is taken as seriously at it should be,” he said. “The task force ended, in my opinion, without full incorporation of climate change considerations.”

A USDA relocation update: In a series of reports last week, we explored how the USDA was using an extremely quick relocation from Washington, D.C. to Kansas City to, in Mick Mulvaney’s words, “drain the swamp” at two departmental agencies. That is, they will shed hundreds of governments economists and researchers who couldn’t make the move on such short notice.

On Friday, negotiations over the move between the USDA and AFGE, the union representing affected employees, bore some fruit.

Under a new agreement, the union said, those who move to Kansas City will be given “incentive payments equal to one month’s salary.” The union said this will partially compensate for employees’ loss of income in the new city (federal guidelines dictate that salaries are adjusted based on the cost of living in the city where the position is located). USDA management framed this aspect of the agreement differently, saying that they’d simply “agree[d] to request approval to offer relocation incentives for roles deemed difficult to fill.”

Also, those who relocate will be able to work remotely through Dec. 30 as opposed to having to report for duty across the country on Sept. 30.

State Dept. political appointees were reportedly “disrespectful and hostile” to career staffers: An inspector general report obtained by Politico on Thursday revealed that two political appointees harassed career staffers.

One of the two appointees, Mari Stull, reportedly maintained a vetting list of career State Department employees based on their loyalty to President Trump. Several bureau employees told investigators Stull accused them of being part of the “deep state.”

In one example of retaliation, investigators said that a legislative staffer in the bureau who’d accompanied the Congressional Black Caucus to the UN, a routine task, was later targeted by Stull because the delegation was made up of only Democrats. The IG noted elsewhere that Stull allegedly threw a report she didn’t like at a State Department staffer, and she separately allegedly retaliated against others for not helping her resolve a claim against her former employer in her favor. She left the State Department in January.