GAO to EPA: Remember the Goo-man!
EPA’s revolving door has delivered at least two senior agency lawyers to environmental groups regularly suing the Agency—sometimes with more of a ‘sweetheart’ tinge to the suits than other times. Two who are now active on the other side of the greens-vs-EPA litigation leviathan are Ryland Shengzhi Li, who left in the first year of the second Trump term for the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), and Abirami Vijayan who left for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) the same year. Both worked on major Clean Air Act programs, often very closely with the green-group complex. Both now challenge their former agency in those same fields on behalf of those groups.
Taxpayers paid these lawyers to serve the government. The revolving door spins, and now the groups that worked alongside EPA under Biden have them on their teams in litigation against Trump’s EPA.
Records released in response to GAO’s FOIA request show Li working at EPA with other lawyers who are now his colleagues and co-counsel (here, here, here, here and here. Withholding Index here). EPA’s withholdingindex lists 66 records withheld in full. The agency has yet to produce records on Vijayan.
EPA’s new leadership should pull and review its own employment and ethics records, in addition to the entire record of the more legally contentious rules now in litigation. When did the job talks begin, and whose interests were these lawyers serving while they were still on the public payroll? As for the Biden-EPA rules themselves, well.
Li’s former contacts are now his colleagues
Li led the legal team responsible for EPA’s transportation regulations, according to EDF. His name appears as “of counsel” on EPA’s November 26, 2024 brief defending the light- and medium-duty vehicle standards in Kentucky v. EPA, No. 24-1087 (D.C. Cir.).
He left EPA in April 2025 for EDF, where he is now Lead Counsel, Clean Transportation. His portfolio still centers on federal and California motor vehicle emission standards.
On February 18, 2026, he appeared as EDF counsel in American Public Health Ass’n v. EPA, No. 26-1037 (D.C. Cir.), challenging the repeal of vehicle greenhouse-gas standards, including standards he had defended for EPA. He also appears on the June 12 notice of intent to sue over EPA’s failure to act on petitions for reconsideration of that repeal.
The working relationship began well before the job change. On February 8, 2024, EPA’s David Orlin wrote to Li about an EDF request for a meeting on the vehicle rule. Orlin expected EDF wanted to see whether it could “bolster the record or support the rule.” Li’s notes from the February 14 meeting identify EDF’s Peter Zalzal as an attendee. Most of the substance is redacted.
On March 27, Li joined another vehicle-rule meeting with EDF’s Zalzal, Andy Su and Alice Henderson, and NRDC’s Ian Fein and Julia Forgie. The meeting records identify the participants and their attendance.
In April, EDF requested technical briefings on the vehicle rules. Li was copied on the arrangements. DOJ’s lawyers wanted to sit in to hear EDF’s questions and EPA’s answers.
By August, NRDC’s draft brief in Texas v. EPA was reaching Li through DOJ and EPA colleagues. NRDC’s Ian Fein sent it under the label “Subject to Common Interest Privilege.”
Zalzal and Henderson now appear beside Li as EDF counsel on the 2026 petition and notice of intent to sue. Forgie appears for NRDC on both. The former agency contacts are now on the same side of the caption against EPA.
The released records leave the employment timeline unanswered. EPA should establish when the job discussions began, what Li was handling then, and what safeguards separated the agency’s work from his prospective employer’s interests.
EPA should also explain the common-interest arrangements under which outside litigants’ drafts reached its lawyers. Who shared what with whom? What justifies withholding communications exchanged with groups outside the government?
Vijayan quickly took the fight back to EPA
Vijayan spent 15 years as a Clean Air Act lawyer at EPA, including three as Assistant General Counsel for its National Ambient Air Quality Standards practice group. Those are her own credentials, given in Senatetestimony on September 10, 2025. NRDC’s biography also credits her work on power-sector and oil-and-gas rules.
EPA published its proposal to rescind the Endangerment Finding on August 1, 2025. Vijayan left the agency that month. By September 22, her name was on NRDC’s comments opposing the proposal. EPA should establish what role she had in the proposal before leaving and when her job discussions with NRDC began.
She was already invoking her government experience in her September 10 Senate testimony. Having “recently joined” NRDC, she introduced her views with “From my experience as a former EPA attorney.” NRDC was putting that experience to use almost immediately.
On May 22, 2026, she signed NRDC’s petition in Sierra Club v. Zeldin. The suit challenges EPA’s determination that Phoenix would have met the 2015 ozone standard by its deadline absent emissions from outside the United States.
She was also NRDC’s public voice in its August 27 announcement of the Cleveland ozone suit, challenging EPA’s redesignation of the area as meeting the standard. Her former EPA portfolio now supplies the subjects of NRDC’s attacks on the agency.
Vijayan also appears as NRDC counsel in American Public Health Ass’n v. EPA, alongside Julia Forgie, whose name appears in Li’s EPA meeting records. Li represents EDF in that same case.
EPA should also establish Vijayan’s role, if any, in drafting or defending the 2024 fine-particulate standard challenged in Kentucky v. EPA, No. 24-1050. NRDC and EDF intervened to defend that rule. Did she work on it or its defense at EPA? Has she since advised NRDC on the same litigation? The agency’s files should answer those questions.
EPA, like all agencies, should diligently review its own files
This is a rational prudent and indeed seemingly unavoidable review, as a general policy: what do our own records tell us about extant or likely litigation, including our own position now-inherited? Do records show we proceeded entirely lawfully, or pre textually or otherwise improperly (indispensable regarding EPA given the Biden administration’s boast—pre-West Virginia v. EPA—of an unlawful whole-of-government, “suite of regulations” approach to its ideological agenda).
Here, EPA should start with the employment and ethics records for both lawyers. First, identify when recruitment began, what each lawyer was working on, and what recusals or authorizations followed. Federal ethics rulesrestrict participation in matters that directly and predictably affect a prospective employer’s financial interests. Public financial-disclosure filers must report employment negotiations or agreements to an agency ethics official within three business days.
For Li, examine the vehicle-rule litigation, California waiver work and Texas v. EPA. For Vijayan, examine the Endangerment proposal and the ozone and particulate matters now being contested. Check their actual assignments, access to confidential material and communications with the groups that hired them.
Then match their government work against their later communications and court appearances. 18 U.S.C. § 207(a) can bar a former lawyer from representing others in the same matters involving specific parties that the lawyer handled or supervised at EPA. Management should check the facts against the statute’s permanent and two-year restrictions.
The regulations expressly distinguish rulemaking from litigation over the rule. Their example bars a former employee who helped defend a rule from representing another party in that same lawsuit. EPA should begin with Li’s documented role in Kentucky v. EPA, No. 24-1087, and examine his later communications and appearances in connection with that case.
EPA should review the common-interest agreements, calendars and messages involving EDF, NRDC and the other groups in these cases. It should also check post-departure contacts with agency staff and whether either lawyer retained nonpublic litigation or deliberative material.
Where official business ran through private accounts, EPA should verify that complete copies reached government systems. Federal law requires copying an official account when the record is created or sent, or forwarding a complete copy within 20 days. Remember the Goo-man.
EPA’s leadership has the unredacted files. It should read them, enforce every applicable conflict rule, and release the records the public is entitled to se