[dashundchen]

That was added since I first read the article.

We'll see if it's actually lifted by then, as we've already seen a lot of misdirection and outright lies from the Trump team.

Also from the article:

"The Trump administration has also ordered what it called a temporary suspension of all new business activities at the department, including issuing task orders or work assignments to EPA contractors. The orders were expected to have a significant and immediate impact on EPA activities nationwide."

"Officials at state and local agencies that rely on EPA for funding said they were left in the dark, saying they had received no information from EPA about the freeze."

Why do they need to quash the speech and operations of employees during the transition, other than to have a chilling effect in the department?

Unless you're already appointing leadership like Scott Pruitt, who is actively hostile to the organization's goals and intent on dismantling it from the inside.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/can-t...

Before the inauguration the transition team sent surveys to the Department of Energy and other agencies seemingly meant to ferret out anyone working on climate science. Trump received a lot of criticism for this. A media blackout would be a good time for him to clean house of anyone who disagrees.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/donald-trump-administration/20...

[refurb]

Why do they need to quash the speech and operations of employees during the transition, other than to have a chilling effect in the department?

Wasn't the National Park Twitter feed trashing Trump and his policies?[1]. Randomly tweeting that the old Whitehouse webpages got deleted, even though that's pretty typical for a new administration.

Why wouldn't you put a stop to that?

What would happen if a company got a new CEO and some random employee started bashing them via the company Twitter account?

[dashundchen]

Think you are missing a link, but I will assume you're referring to the NPS tweet about crowd size.

Was it the most appropriate thing to do on an agency twitter account? Maybe not.

But that tweet has nothing to do with the EPA or Department of Ag, and intentionally hampering their business and operations. There are other motivations at play here.

That's not even getting into the ridiculous crowd size discussion and "alternative facts" that were being pushed.

I'm genuinely afraid of how Trump and his team are so thin-skinned to a tweet or criticism, considering the real challenges and attacks the office has and will need to face.

[refurb]

I don't disagree the crowd size issue is pretty silly.

That said, if some gov't agency started Tweeting negative things about the Obama administration after his inauguration, would any talk about a "chilling effect" if he told them to stop? I'm not his biggest fan, but I wouldn't fault him for that.

The job of the National Parks service is pretty clear. Tweeting their political opinions using their employer's account are not one of them.