How Free Should Gov't Workers Be? EPA Lawyers Get Into YouTube Trouble over Cap-and-Trade
BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, November 10 2009
Nearly everyone can publish online in one form or another these days. Should they? That's a question with particular resonance when "everyone" includes government employees, particularly those working in service of a presidential administration. Two Environmental Protection Agency attorneys have drawn the attention of their higher-ups because they posted a YouTube video calling into question the wisdom of the Waxman-Markey bill on cap and trade. The ten-minute video essay, made by a husband and wife team of EPA attorneys stationed in the San Francisco regional office, is called "The Huge Mistake." The short film is broken into three provocative sections: "The Big Lie," "The Big Rip-Off," and "The Real Solution." The New York Times' John M. Broder and Leslie Kaufman report on how the two administration lawyers found themselves in trouble:
On Thursday, Mr. Zabel said, regional ethics officers with the agency met with him to express concerns about the video and to demand that it be taken down by the next day. Ms. Williams was traveling and did not take part in the meeting.
E.P.A. officials said the agency did not object to the content of the video or the op-ed article or challenge the couple’s right to express their opinions. But they said that government ethics rules required them to state that the opinions were their own and not those of the agency.
"E.P.A. has nearly 18,000 employees, and all of them are free to -- and many do -- publicly express their views on issues of the day, including issues that are central to E.P.A.’s mission," Scott Fulton, the agency’s general counsel, said in a statement. However, the video did say the opinions were those of Mr. Williams and Ms. Zabel and were not meant to represent the agency.
But as Broder and Kaufman point out, that last bit isn't exactly true. To be sure, Williams and Zabel weren't afraid to challenge authority in their video piece. In it, they go so far as to compare the Obama Administration's take on cap and trade legislation with the "ill-fated Challenger launch." There too, said the EPA attorneys, politicians ignored specialists, to disastrous ends. Hard-hitting stuff, no doubt.
Still, Zabel and Williams did attempt to don their cautious lawyers pants in the course of the video. They make a point of stating that their YouTube'd opinions are their own, and only their own. "We are speaking out as parents, citizens, a married couple, and attorneys," said Ms. Williams. On Mr. Zabel's part, he sought to evoke the authority of their government posts -- "Our opinions are based on more than 20 years each working as attorneys at the U.S. Environmental Agency in the San Francisco regional office" -- but he too has eager to make it clear that he was speaking as a private citizen. "Nothing in this video," he said, "is intended to represent the views of the EPA or the Obama Administration."
Nevertheless, it seems, a well-produced video short, one that included B-roll footage of the EPA's California headquarters, was simple too much public expression for EPA administrators. And Zabel and Williams seem to have to come to agree; the New York Times' Broder and Kaufman report that they attempted to pull the video offline, only to find that there were multiple copies out of their control now floating around the Internet.