**Written by Doug Powers

Not long ago, Donald Trump’s transition team asked the Department of Energy to give them the names of employees who work on Obama’s climate change initiatives. The DoE’s answer? No. For entrenched DoE bureaucrats, accountability seems to be the change in climate they fear the most:

The U.S. Energy Department said on Tuesday it will not comply with a request from President-elect Donald Trump’s Energy Department transition team for the names of people who have worked on climate change and the professional society memberships of lab workers.
[…]
Energy Department spokesman Eben Burnham-Snyder said Tuesday the department will not comply.

“Our career workforce, including our contractors and employees at our labs, comprise the backbone of (the Energy Department) and the important work our department does to benefit the American people,” Burnham-Snyder said.

“We are going to respect the professional and scientific integrity and independence of our employees at our labs and across our department,” he added. “We will be forthcoming with all publicly available information with the transition team. We will not be providing any individual names to the transition team.”

He added that the request “left many in our workforce unsettled.”

The integral “backbone” of the DoE doing important work “to benefit the American people” sure seem hesitant to step forward and accept their accolades. In the real world, imagine a corporation getting a new CEO who asks one of the department heads for the names of the people who work on a certain project, and the department head tells him to go screw himself.

This standoff just begs for a “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”-style ending: Redford and Newman, wearing shirts sporting the original Obama-era DOE logo, run from the abandoned Solyndra warehouse throwing copies of “An Inconvenient Truth” and are taken down by feds in red “Make America Great Again” hats using hot dog cannons to fire termination notices written on the back of pages from Abound Solar’s bankruptcy filing. Dare to dream.

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe