CHICAGO — For a long time, Nicole Cantello had zero interest in talking to the press.
“I didn’t want to,” the longtime EPA lawyer-turned-union-boss told a reporter on a recent Friday in her downtown 15th-floor union conference room. Cantello had been misquoted several times in her decades as an agency attorney, she said, and she didn’t trust the press.
She changed her mind after President Donald Trump’s first election, when she perceived EPA and its employees to be under threat. “It became a necessity,” she said.
For one thing, she hired a communications strategist who began offering press trainings for EPA employees so they could explain their work to the public. And Cantello, who took the helm of the union representing EPA workers in 2019, made it a point to respond to a flood of reporters’ inquiries.
