Until Judge Merrick B. Garland is confirmed as Attorney General, Monty Wilkinson, a longtime career official who worked closely with Eric H. Holder Jr. when he was Attorney General, is acting as an interim.
The acting assistant attorney general is John P. Carlin, who headed the Justice Department’s national security division during the Obama administration. He is in office only until Lisa Monaco, who has worked closely with Carlin over the years, is confirmed as deputy attorney general. She served as Obama’s internal security adviser and, during the Trump years, she and Carlin led a group that studied the most difficult issues of cyber politics.
As much as the politicization of the Justice Department angered Trump’s critics, the neutralization of the Environmental Protection Agency generated outrage among the progressives, and it’s probably not surprising that the agency is already in the midst of the transformation.
About a month before Induction Day, a Trump employee who ran the water office, Charlotte Bertrand, suddenly emerged as the woman she would take on as interim administrator if the agency head resigned. When that moment came, she never had a chance to settle in the chair.
Within hours of his presidency, Biden appointed Jane Nishida, the agency’s assistant chief deputy chief of the Office of Tribal and International Affairs, to lead the agency until his nominee, Michael S. Regan, North Carolina’s chief environmental regulator, confirmed.
But long before Regan arrived at the building, a group of young employees – a list that reads like who’s who of the climate change policy experts, many of them selected from the Obama administration – will be working.
Tiernan Sittenfeld, the senior vice president for government affairs for the League of Conservationist Voters, said the team of experienced officials was chosen specifically to do a quick job of reversing Trump’s policies.
“It was clear that we were moving out of the most anti-environmental and anti-climate action management we’ve ever had,” said Sittenfeld. She added: “The need to act immediately would be extremely important. There was a very intentional, very careful and ambitious effort to place highly qualified specialists immediately. “
The report was contributed by Lisa Friedman, Noah Weiland, Glenn Thrush, Helene Cooper, Coral Davenport, Katie Benner, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs.