Former Trump administration EPA official Mandy Gunasekara has written a book on the “deep state” in which she also reveals she was recently subpoenaed in a federal inquiry.
“Y’all Fired: A Southern Belle’s Guide to Restoring Federalism and Draining the Swamp,” is due out Oct. 1, Gunasekara announced recently. Its title is a reference to former President Donald Trump’s “You’re Fired” catchphrase that originated when he appeared on “The Apprentice.”
In the prologue to her book, she writes that in early May, FBI officials and a representative from EPA’s Office of Inspector General showed up at an office in Oxford, Mississippi Gunasekara shares with her husband. She was away at the time.
“The trio informed my husband that they were in town to serve me a subpoena related to an ongoing criminal investigation,” she writes.
Gunasekara said her husband accepted the subpoena on her behalf and was told that “they were in the process of convening a grand jury.”
It’s unclear what specifically the grand jury is investigating. Spokespersons for both the FBI and EPA inspector general did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Gunasekara says that she is the target of “legal harassment.”
“This strategy is novel in that the Deep State wants to get at its opponents before they even enter into public service,” she writes. “As with Biden’s lawfare against President Trump, the logic here is that, if partisans can sully my reputation with spurious charges, they can sink any potential confirmation vote or make the administration think twice before hiring me to a senior role.”
In an interview on a Mississippi-based talk show last week, she told host Paul Gallo that the subpoena was “asking for information pertaining to work from 2017,” though she insisted, “There’s nothing there.”
Gunasekara previously told POLITICO’s E&E News she was not interested in becoming EPA administrator if Trump returns to the White House. Asked about other potential roles in a Trump administration, she said, “TBD.”
Gunasekara has stayed close to the Trump orbit since his term ended in 2021 and was a lead author of the Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership,” the policy playbook conservatives wrote for Trump, but which he has tried to distance himself from.
‘It’s not going to be pretty’
In her book, she echoes goals championed by both Trump and his allies: slashing the size and scope of the federal government, eliminating federal agencies and regulations, and firing federal employees en masse.
“President Trump has done a good job exposing what the Deep State is and how they operate. This book provides some additional anecdotal experiences to show the depth of the Deep State, but then it does a historical review of how we got to where we currently are,” Gunasekara told E&E News.
Gunasekara was chief of staff at EPA in 2020 and 2021 under Administrator Andrew Wheeler, and was earlier a top official in the agency’s air pollution office. Skyhorse Publishing, which is known for publishing conservative titles, highlighted a review by Wheeler, saying Gunasekara “wants a clean environment for her children, without harming the economy with senseless red tape.”
She argues that the current problems with the federal government trace their origins to the 16th Amendment to the Constitution, which allowed for a progressive income tax, and the 17th Amendment, which allowed voters to pick senators and made them more directly responsive to political forces.
“It can be fixed, but it’s not going to be pretty,” she said. “There are some steps that can be taken to drastically reduce the size and reach of the federal government and restore balance between the unelected, unaccountable bureaucrat and the individual voter.”
Those steps include reinstating Trump’s Schedule F, which sought to redesignate many career civil service employees in the federal government as political appointees who could be fired and hired by the president, and to audit federal contracting, Gunasekara said.
She ran last year for Mississippi’s Public Service Commission but was disqualified since she had not lived in the state for long enough before election day.
Her book is along a similar vein — though more “radical,” as she puts it — as a book released last year by Trump’s Interior secretary, David Bernhardt, that takes aim at career federal employees.
Correction: A previous version of this story said agents went to Gunasekara’s home. They went to an office she shares with her husband.
