Biden EPA Officials Spent Time ‘De-Gendering’ Bathrooms and Policing Pronoun Use, Internal Docs Show

Biden EPA Officials Spent Time ‘De-Gendering’ Bathrooms and Policing Pronoun Use, Internal Docs Show

March 10, 2025

Biden-era Environmental Protection Agency employees spent work hours implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion policies throughout the agency—focusing in particular on “de-gendering” bathrooms, hiring more gay and transgender employees, and introducing new gender-neutral honorifics such as “Mx.,” according to internal agency documents and communications reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

Under the leadership of then-EPA administrator Michael Regan, in 2021, the agency created an employee-led “DEIA implementation team” that was empowered to establish workgroups and take DEI-related actions. The goal, according to the Biden EPA, was to “embed” DEI agency-wide, create “cultural change,” and establish the agency as a DEI model for the entire federal government.

The EPA documents—which were first obtained by the watchdog group Functional Government Initiative and shared with the Free Beacon—show the EPA’s DEI initiatives were largely coordinated by its LGBTQIA+ Workgroup, which reported to senior leadership. The workgroup’s members included a scientist, environmental protection specialist, engineer, plant pathologist, climate policy analyst, attorney adviser, and research ethicist among others.

The documents are the latest evidence of how ingrained DEI efforts were at the EPA and across the entire Biden administration. President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign took aim at such efforts and, on his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order dismantling all existing taxpayer-funded DEI initiatives and DEI offices. “The public release of these plans demonstrated immense public waste and shameful discrimination,” the order stated.

The agency’s DEI initiatives likely cost taxpayers millions of dollars in man-hours. The average EPA employee’s annual salary is $102,489, 42.9 percent higher than the national average for government employees, while officials known to have been involved in the initiatives were paid as much as $168,400, according to Open Payrolls.

“In the Biden years, 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,” the Functional Government Initiative told the Free Beacon. “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,” it added. “This was not presidential leadership, but rather government dysfunction.”

The EPA’s LGBTQIA+ Workgroup, meanwhile, outlined its DEI-related activities during a summit in September 2023 hosted by the left-wing group Out and Equal.

According to slides of its presentation reviewed by the Free Beacon, the group’s top recommendations for the EPA were to “de-gender” restroom and locker room access, increase participation in voluntary self-disclosure of sexual orientation and gender identity, incorporate LGBTQIA+ prospective employees into recruiting activities, add gender pronouns on email signatures, and change internal style manual requirements for gendered honorifics.

The Biden EPA’s LGBTQIA+ Workgroup highlighted its top recommendations for “priority action” during a presentation during a left-wing conference in 2023.

The workgroup noted in the presentation that it met weekly to craft its recommendations and that it informed EPA leaders in 2023 that it would not sunset as originally planned, and would continue meeting.

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