WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — Newly uncovered documents show that former President Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) aggressively focused on “de-gendering” agency restrooms and locker rooms, hiring more homosexual and gender-confused employees, and enforcing preferred pronoun usage in its workforce at the expense of pursuing the agency’s mission.
The “degendering” push at the EPA was part of its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts to bring about agency-wide “cultural change” that would then serve as a DEI model for the entire federal government, according to the Washington Free Beacon (WFB).
The EPA documents – which were first obtained by the watchdog group Functional Government Initiative and were first reported by WFB – demonstrate how, like other government agencies at every level throughout the nation, the EPA became obsessed with the most fringe elements of the DEI craze during the Biden years.
Wasted money and wasted time
“Ignoring actual issues plaguing our nation, the Biden administration, unsurprisingly, chose to expend resources on controversial DEI initiatives,” Functional Government Initiative (FGI) told Fox News Digital. “De-gendering restrooms and diverting staff time to these policies did nothing for EPA’s statutory mission. Yet, the Biden administration fostered dysfunction by advancing radical ideologies of the few, at the expense of the many.”
During the Biden administration, “Americans endured crisis after crisis, many of them—rampant illegal immigration, draconian COVID-19 measures, and skyrocketing fuel costs — of the president’s own making,” FGI told the WFB. “What was the administration instead focused on? A phony crisis of inequity, racism, and ‘transphobia,’ which could only be met by wasting vast resources on un-American, divisive initiatives.”
“Unfortunately, the EPA wasn’t alone: the rot grew across the federal government with the encouragement of the administration,” noted the watchdog group. “This was not presidential leadership, but rather government dysfunction.”
Instead of tending to the environmental issues facing the nation, the EPA “added pronouns to emails, targeted specific offices where people were ‘misgendered,’’ and instituted policies allowing employees to select their preferred honorifics such as “Mx.” instead of “Mr.”, “Mrs.”, or “Ms.”
The EPA memo also called for the agency to “increase participation in voluntary self-disclosure of sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI)” and “incorporate LGBTQIA+ prospective employees into hiring and recruiting activities.”
“Under President Trump, the EPA will be focused on our core mission to protect human health and the environment, while Powering the Great American Comeback,” explained Lee Zeldin, Trump’s newly appointed EPA administrator.
“The previous Administration used DEI and environmental justice to advance ideological priorities, distributing billions of dollars to organizations in the name of climate equity. This ends now,” he declared. “We will be good stewards of tax dollars and do everything in our power to deliver clean air, land, and water to every American, regardless of race, religion, background, and creed.”
Zeldin has already canceled millions of dollars earmarked for DEI efforts within the agency and has placed over 170 DEI employees on leave.
