Brandon Marshall
Audio By Carbonatix
When Colorado sends its people to Washington, D.C., we’re not sending our best.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency named Denver-area eye doctor Brian Joondeph to the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee on Monday, March 9. As a member of the influential panel, the ophthalmologist will advise the EPA on federal air quality regulations and the health impacts of air pollution.
Except, Joondeph has no discernible background in air pollution science. As reported by the New York Times, Joondeph “has never published a peer-reviewed paper dealing with air pollution,” despite being appointed as the committee’s designated physician. Before Joondeph took the physician seat, for the past fifty years, it had been “filled by pulmonologists, cardiologists and others who have researched how exposure to air pollution increases the risk of asthma, heart and lung diseases, cancer and other ailments,” the NYT article reads.
But what Joondeph lacks in experience, he apparently makes up for in devotion to President Donald Trump.
In addition to being an eye doctor, Joondeph is a columnist for the conservative publications American Thinker and Rasmussen Reports. He has written extensively in support of Trump’s policies, ranging from immigration enforcement to military action in Venezuela, and even his claim that Tylenol is bad for pregnant women.
“What is illegal immigration if not an attempt to recruit impoverished, unskilled and frequently illiterate migrants onto American welfare rolls, only to be counted in the census?” Joondeph wrote in one article. “Fortunately, President Donald Trump stands apart from previous presidents who have kept the borders open at the request of the donor class. …After all, wealthy Democrats and Republicans require their houses cleaned and their lawns mowed in a spirit of bipartisanship.”
In another article, he credited Trump with ending the so-called war on Christmas and leaving Democrats “triggered.” “President Trump said ‘Merry Christmas’ like a normal person and the left lost its mind,” Joondeph wrote. “‘Happy Holidays’ is a pablum-sounding avoidance of reality, similar to calling Dylan Mulvaney ‘she’ or ‘her.'”
The decision to tap a local unqualified Trump fanboy to an EPA committee is disturbing, but not unprecedented.
Coloradan fossil fuels executive Chris Wright was selected to lead the U.S. Energy Department in November 2024. Wright, a climate change skeptic and major Trump donor, has since shifted the department’s focus away from its clean energy initiatives. In January, a federal judge ruled that Wright violated the law by hand-picking a secretive group of researchers to produce a report downplaying the effects of climate change.
To the rest of the country, on behalf of Colorado, we’re sorry.
