Public sector entrepreneurship, politics, and innovation

Plain English Summary Declining experienced STEM employees at the EPA during President Donald Trump's Administration is associated with declining innovative environmental scientific publications. A public sector entrepreneur is an individual who champions an innovative public policy. In this paper we propose that President Trump's Administration's policies toward the EPA during his administration were innovative, although different from that of previous administrations. These policies sought to reorient the EPA toward industrial and industry-friendly interests which was contrary to the agency's health and environmental missions. One response to the administration's new policies was that experienced STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) employees left the EPA. A social consequence of the departure of experienced STEM employees is that the number of environmentally related scientific publications-one indicator of an agency's innovative activity-from EPA scientists declined. An implication from our empirical findings is that not all public sector entrepreneurial actions are socially desirable; some have potentially detrimental short-run and possible long-run effects on society as a whole. We suggest that a political leader or a political administration can be described in terms of a public sector entrepreneurship framework. To illustrate, we define the actions of US President Donald Trump's Administration to refocus the emphasis of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as an innovative public policy initiative. And, we explore empirically the social consequences of those actions in terms of changes in the number of STEM employees at the EPA and the number of attendant innovative scientific publications. We find that declining experienced STEM employees at the EPA during President Trump's Administration is associated with declining innovative environmental scientific publications.