Environmental Protection Agency officials are “leaving in droves”, reports the New York Times.

More than 700 people have left the Environmental Protection Agency since President Trump took office, a wave of departures that puts the administration nearly a quarter of the way toward its goal of shrinking the agency to levels last seen during the Reagan administration.

What marvellous news to ease us all into the festive Christmas spirit, eh readers?

Why, it’s like the final scene in A Christmas Carol where Scrooge repents of all his miserliness, his nephew Fred gets a big fat turkey, Bob Cratchit gets a pay rise and Tiny Tim declares “God bless us, every one!”

Not, of course, that this is quite the way the New York Times sees it. It wants us to believe that this is an attack on both science and the environment.

Within the agency, science in particular is taking a hard hit. More than 27 percent of those who left this year were scientists, including 34 biologists and microbiologists; 19 chemists; 81 environmental engineers and environmental scientists; and more than a dozen toxicologists, life scientists and geologists. Employees say the exodus has left the agency depleted of decades of knowledge about protecting the nation’s air and water. Many also said they saw the departures as part of a more worrisome trend of muting government scientists, cutting research budgets and making it more difficult for academic scientists to serve on advisory boards.

Actually, though, what it really is is #winning.

EPA administrator Scott Pruitt is achieving what President Trump appointed him to do. He is draining the swamp.

As I’ve argued before, the EPA has always had less to do with protecting the environment – Colorado gold mine, anyone? – than it does with killing business.

Essentially, it is a communist sleeper cell introduced to the heart of the U.S. government system by Richard Nixon in the mistaken belief that paying Danegeld to your enemies will make them leave you alone.

Previous Republican presidents – such as the Bushes – were far too squishy to dare reform it.

Democrat presidents, most notably Obama, used it as a way of bypassing Congress and imposing on the U.S. a United-Nations-driven globalist agenda almost entirely inimical to the interests of American citizens.

The most egregious example of this was the EPA’s Endangerment Finding, which declared carbon dioxide – and various other harmless trace gases – to be a threat to “the public health and welfare of current and future generations.”

This was a political decision, not a scientific one, forced through by Obama’s hatchetwoman Lisa Jackson.

As Dennis Ambler argued at the time in this Science and Public Policy paper:

The EPA is effectively no longer under the control of the US Congress; its allegiance is to the UN and implementation of the policies of Sustainable Development via Agenda 21. It has considerable involvement in the IPCC reports and claims the UN body as a peer reviewed authority, in pursuing ever more rigorous controls of “CO2 pollution”, to bring about the realisation of “environmental governance”. Whilst Lisa Jackson is currently the face on the box at the EPA, she is simply carrying out the tasks expected of her by the globalist movement in setting the scene for more international control, under the leadership of the United Nations.

Most of the EPA authors of the Endangerment Technical Support Document were economists and environmental policy specialists with qualifications like Masters in International Affairs or Public Policy or Management. Those few that were scientists were bought and paid up members of the UN/IPCC establishment, with no interest in questioning the alarmist consensus.

The junk science of the Endangerment Finding was in turn responsible for Obama’s monumentally destructive Clean Power Plan, which drove up energy prices, hit U.S. economic competitiveness and killed jobs.

Anyone who thinks it’s sad that 700 EPA officials have lost their jobs should maybe consider the 50,000 workers in the U.S. coal industry alone who lost their jobs as a result the EPA-enforced Clean Power Plan.

Of all the many disastrous decisions made by the Obama administration, probably the most dishonest and damaging was the one whereby it branded the harmless trace gas which helps plants to grow as public enemy number one.

The EPA was an unaccountable agency promulgating a massive lie to the detriment of the American people, their freedoms and their livelihoods.

Donald Trump has given America a good many reasons to celebrate this Christmas. His defanging of the EPA might well be the greatest one of them all.