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a future episode. You can also reach out to us by email at podcast at Bloomberg Law dot com or on Twitter at b Law. We would love to hear your thoughts. Joe Biden is learning what pretty much every president who came before him has also learned. Doing anything quickly with the federal government is nearly impossible. Today. On the podcast, we talk about all the deadlines the presidents set for his agencies on climate change and why those
deadlines have come and gone. Hello, and welcome back once again two Parts per Billion, the Environmental podcast from Bloomberg Law. So I remember this one time I was interviewing someone at the EPA about when a new regulation would be coming out, and they told me it would be out in the summer. Then after the interview, a lobbyist came out to me and said, hey, you messed up. You didn't ask him summer of what year. That's kind of
how the federal government operates, with a few exceptions. Deadlines are things that are made to be flexible, almost to the point of absurdity. But it's not really an ideal situation when you're dealing with climate change, a nearly existential threat that grows more immediate every day. Joe Biden campaigned on taking bold action to address this threat, and he set out some ambitious goals for his federal agencies to meet within the first few months. However, according to Courtney Rosen,
that hasn't really happened. Courtney is our White House reporter, and she just wrote a story about all the climate deadlines the federal government has blown. Courtney joined us today from the White House, and she started off by talking about exactly what the President wanted to get done. Write a plan for the federal government to stock up on electric cars. That's something the President talks about a lot. Write a strategy for climate change risks to be integrated
into how they plan national security matters. Over the Defense Department, putting together a Civilian Climate Corps. They call it, this idea of putting young people to work working on forests, and that's coming out of Interior and the Agriculture Department. Some of the stuff that was smaller, like hiring someone to be the chief Climate Change person at the White House. That Gena McCarthy. That was in one of the orders. So there's a lot of stuff in there, some of
them small, some of them big. Some of these tasks they did accomplish, like hiring Geena McCarthy, but a lot of them they didn't. And let's talk about those. In fact, let's start off with the cars thing. This is developing a plan to make all the cars that the federal government owns electric. That was supposed to happen within the first six months. It did not. Yeah. So the cars one specifically is something notable because it's the President talks
about it constantly. He's been to Michigan to drive an electric version of a four to f one fifty. There is a really memorable photo app of him in the electric fe fifty wearing the glasses. I don't even think we need to explain what those are, but the sunglasses. Yeah, So he has talked constantly from the campaign trail about the federal government setting the example on electric cars, and what has common implementation in the last six months is,
like most things easier said than done. Federal government owns something like six hundred and forty thousand cars. We're talking regular cars driving from buildings, and then you've got cars that need to be able to go through dirt and grass and big trucks, and I mean it's a lot of different things. I knew it would be a lot, because it's the whole federal gover but even more than
half a million cars, that's a lot. Yeah. So that was due at the end of April, some kind of plan to do it, and we haven't seen it yet last I checked last night with the Council on Environmental Quality. It is being reviewed internally but hasn't been put out yet. So that's one of the examples of these big promises
that just hasn't come to fruition. So are we talking about, you know, a situation where they were supposed to do it in four months but instead they're going to be doing it in eight months, because you know that's that is a blown deadline. But ultimately, does that really have any effect, or is this a situation where they're supposed to do it in four months and there's no there's no situation in sight where they're going to be able to issue this report. So I'm not sure I know
that right now. The agencies, or excuse me, the agency that handles car shopping, they're offering more electric options. A couple of weeks ago, on looking at their list and there's Tesla's on there. This morning I looked at it and there's a electric version of a Hummer. They're definitely buying them to offer them. It's just the broader strategy is not done yet, so I don't know if that means we're going to see a strategy sometime in the future.
They're already getting started on the buying. It's just a question of when are we going to see the plan. But it's interesting that these are the deadlines that the presidents set for the first few months of his presidency, and these are, as you mentioned, you know, mostly plans mostly like developer report, write something up. You know, that's a pretty preliminary step, and they're not meeting these deadlines.
It seems like it doesn't bode well for the rest of the Biden presidency if they're already missing deadlines on just the sort of most preliminary climate actions. Yeah, I you know, I don't think doesn't bode well, is the
right way I would phrase it. I might say that it's going to take time to get agencies to be able to do these things, and there's going to be this push and pull at least at the beginning of the White House wants that's done by a certain time point, the agencies can complete it by a different one, and eventually it's going to end up somewhere in the middle. And you know, there's so many agencies at this point
that aren't staffed up with their political appointees. So these are career folks, like at the Defense Department, that are writing a strategy on climate that political appointees might come in and implement, and so they're not set up yet. I don't think that the President put forward these deadlines necessarily as hard or you know, we need to buy
this date, we need to buy that date. He's more trying to make the point that this matters to us, and we're going to shift the whole federal government in that direction. Whether it happens by the timeline that he's put out. No, but it's also more of a statement. Well, you know, you and I have both covered the federal bureaucracy pretty closely, and you know, miss deadlines are nothing new. This is like, you know, just a part of the
air that we breathe here in the federal bureaucracy. But there are different reasons for why an agency might miss a deadline. You know, part of it might just be again, you know, career employees are you need to get review from politicals who aren't in place yet. Part of it, though, might also just be that these agencies don't have enough funding. They don't have the manpower to be able to meet these deadlines. I think it depends on the task, and it depends on the agency. And when you bring up
the funding piece of it. For example, if you go into budget requests that just came out from the agencies, these requests to Congress asking we want this money for this thing, and we see if Congress says yes or no. A lot of the mandates that they got in these executive orders are asking Congress for money to implement, So that to me sends a signal of we need the resources to be able to do this as well. One good example is the Interior and Agriculture departments asking for
funding to set up this Civilian Climate Corps. The budgets show that the agencies are thinking about it. It's just a question of is Congress going to say, yes, we'll give you the money. And we're in that process right now. So let me put on a conspiracy theory here and see what you think about it. I'm not even sure I really believe this, but let's just throw it out so you know, in addition to having politicals not in place or not having enough funding, those are two possible
reasons why they missed deadlines. Is it also possible that there are folks in the federal government who were hired or appointed during the Trump administration who may be ideologically opposed to this work and are kind of slow rolling it on purpose. Again, not saying that's happening, not saying I even agree with that, but let's just talk about it. So I don't have any evidence of that at this point,
and people have said that to me. What I would say is that agencies know that they've got to follow a process, right, So, like, let's say they want to put out a regulation we need to accept public comments on that regulation, we have to put out a proposal, we've got to think about those comments, and we've got to put out a final proposal. And if they don't follow that path or those exact steps, whatever they're working
on could get overturned by a court. And so agencies are often very they want to stick to their process, and that doesn't always meet the deadline that the president puts forward. And so my answer to that question is not necessarily Trump related, but more process related. And we saw at the end of the Trump administration so many regulations that they put forward that we're just they didn't authorize cross or teeth like this, and then the courts
overturned them. So that's what I take away from some of the slowness for sure. Yeah, no, that that makes a lot of sense. Finally, you know, earlier I said, you know that the fact that all these deadlines are being missed so soon in the presidency doesn't really bode well for the future of climate policy under Biden, and you kind of were like, well, I don't know about that.
It sounds like that's that, you know, we shouldn't read too much into this or that I shouldn't read too much into this about what this means for climate policy under Biden. Is that is that right that that you know, Biden could still make some transformative climate policy decisions despite
these early missdeadlines. Totally. And I would also say that what I would take from this is we talk about agency action as being away for the president to get stuff done without necessarily having to call and ask permission from Congress. This is also going to have tough parts to it. Congress is not the only barrier to getting things done. It's bureaucracy and in the agency is just like anything else. So it's just something to be aware of that Executive branch action isn't just a cure all.
I can do things in five seconds. Seconds isn't the right word, but I can do things quickly, it's got to be It takes time, it takes process, and we're going to watch that unfold in the next couple of years. Yeah. I think every president runs into that, especially President Obama with climate policy. You know, where they can't get it done in Congress, they decide to do as much as they can through the executive branch and can't do a lot there either. So Yeah, this is like a running
theme with the executive branch. I guess the other thing to be watching is in November, there's a summit in Glasgow to it through the United Nations. These countries get together to come up with a new agreement climate agreement. If you think about the Paris Agreement from several years ago.
The US walked out of that during the Trump administration, and so a lot of what has been happening is President Biden being having to convince other nations we're back, we're serious about this, and other nations aren't going to jump on board in those talks and really put forward big proposals if it looks like the US doesn't really
pay attention or isn't really invested in it. And so I would be watching in the next couple of months leading into this conference for the President to really put muscle behind some of these items, because that's something he can walk into the conference. I don't say him personally. Secretary Carrie, who was a Secretary of State now is
the President's global climate investador. That Secretary of hearing him walk into those meetings and say I did this, we did this in the US, we did that, we did this, and show some muscle. So that's really a date to watch. If we're thinking about deadlines, all right, well, maybe we'll have you back on to talk about that, but for now. Cordy Rosen is a White House reporter for Bloomberg Law, and she is currently at the White House right now. Thank you, Courtney so much for talking with us. Thanks
for having me. That's it for today's episode of Parts Pervilion. If you want more environmental news, check us out on Twitter. We use the handle at environment I am at David B. Schultz if you wanted to talk to me. That is b as in Joe Biden's sunglasses. Today's episode of Parts Pervilion was produced by myself, David Schultz. Parts per Billion was created by Jessica Coombs and Rachel Dagle, and our executive producer is Josh Block. Thank you so much for listening.
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