Before joining the federal government as a health policy staffer, Balbus served a the “Chief Health Scientist” at one of the left’s leading advocacy groups, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF).  EDF has a long history of opposing conservative policies, and has been staffed by some of the nations most aggressive leftists, including Balbus.

In recent weeks, EDF has redoubled it’s efforts to fight President Trump’s America First Agenda:

Environmental Defense Fund will oppose Trump's candidacy as it aims to spend $20M before election

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"Make no mistake about the stakes. Mr. Trump is worse on our core issues today than he was four years ago," David Kieve, president of EDF Action, the group's advocacy partner, said in a statement released Wednesday and shared in advance with NBC News. 

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"All the progress we have made in the last four years is at risk. We have made historic investments in combatting the climate crisis, super charging the clean energy transition, and addressing environmental injustice," Kieve said. "We have gotten more done on climate than in any similar period in American history, and the contrast with Mr. Trump’s tenure in office could not be more dramatic."

The Biden campaign praised the group's decision.

"EDF Action played a critical role in helping pass President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act — the most ambitious climate legislation the world has ever seen," said campaign chair Jen O'Malley Dillon in a statement. "As Donald Trump makes it his mission to roll back efforts to combat the climate crisis, EDF’s leadership, efforts and resources will be essential to defeating Trump and his destructive agenda once again."

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Balbus’s association with EDF, and his continuing work within the federal government on radical climate and DEI policy, shows that he is going to be out of step with an administration that is focused on color-bling public policy and initiatives that reward merit over identity.  

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As the head of the Office of Climate Change and HealthEquity Balbus is at the center of working to inject racially divisive “health equity” policy into all layers of federal health care policy and agency activities.  

Notably while in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt at the United Nation’s climate summit, Balbus laid out his plan on how he was working to ensure that every aspect of federal health policy – including the federal government’s interactions with the private sector – was imbued with health equity policy:

Sure so our office really is a new entity there has not been a central hub for climate action within the Department of Health and Human Services um and so the first aspect of the whole of government approach is creating a whole of HHS a whole of Health and Human Services and bringing together the Medicare side and the payor side and the Food and Drug regulation and bringing HHS on board but more importantly being in HHS we can connect up climate action with a broader move for Health Equity which has arisen out of the covid pandemic so we learned a lot of hard lessons in covid and one of them is that underlying health disparities in communities that have experienced racial discrimination and then marginalized that they fared much worse than the covid pandemic and then we have to address Upstream drivers of Health to address the next pandemic or just to address the health disparities that we have the good news is that a lot of what's going on in the climate action side and the other agencies what's going on you know inflation reduction act

Conservatives often fail to appreciate the intersectionality of the leftists and their efforts to join diverse issues together, wedding the Inflation Reduction Act to racial equity policy.  By leaving Balbus in place – as he was during the first Trump Administration, he will have a perch to continue to advocate for racial divisive policies that undermine the ability to deliver the greatest health care possible to American.  

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