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When Freedhoff dug in, what she found was often just … weird. Like a pile of simple, low-level tasks that had ended up on her desk: two hundred perfunctory notices that hadn’t been sent to the federal register, the daily log of official government actions. Fifteen months worth of new chemical rules that had been approved but not publicly announced. They weren’t controversial. It’s just that nobody but the office head had been allowed to click a button.

Gradually, Freedhoff, a hyperlogical fast talker who occasionally flashes a big smile when something amuses her, realized that her predecessor under then-President Donald Trump simply hadn’t delegated routine duties — a symptom of the distrust within the office between career employees and political appointees.

In those first strange weeks, Freedhoff would gaze out on a sea of staffers’ faces filling a Microsoft Teams grid on her screen and ask why something happened the way it did. No one would respond. Later, she’d learn that there was no thoughtful answer to “why”; the person responsible was simply following orders. Often, Freedhoff found, staff had been detailed to trivial projects to help companies that had relationships with Trump appointees.

“We thought we knew which rules were messed with, we thought we knew which policies and which offices were shrunk,” Freedhoff mused last fall, sitting on a bench in the courtyard outside the EPA’s imposing headquarters in Washington. “But I found the damage to be a lot more pervasive than that.”

There’s a saying in Washington that “personnel is policy”: Political appointees in federal agencies are essential to carrying out the president’s plans. With Biden’s legislative agenda stalled, progressives are pushing people like Freedhoff to make good on the president’s promise that government can tackle big problems again.

Biden’s own campaign slogan had been to “build back better.” But Freedhoff’s first year has been a process of learning just how much she’d need to build just to get back to the way things were before Trump arrived. She told me about it in a series of interviews that provide a window into the Biden administration’s struggles to deliver on the president’s promises.

“We all just assumed that everything would sort of snap back to normal,” said Freedhoff, who has been sleeping even less than usual these days. “There was this initial burst of, ‘Thank God, we made it,’ and there were expectations that things would change more quickly than they have.”

Her budget only recently got a small boost, after years of starvation. Her staff remains overstretched. Unexpected roadblocks have cropped up, both inside and outside the agency, hampering her ability to execute decisions. And now, while they acknowledge the positive steps taken so far, the environmentalists she once worked alongside are increasingly voicing frustration that Freedhoff isn’t doing enough.

“I’m concerned,” said Daniel Rosenberg, director of federal toxics policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “I firmly believe that she is committed to protecting public health and the environment. I think the jury’s still out as to where they’re going, and there’s been enough things that are worrisome.”

Freedhoff got her political education in an era when environmental protections were in retreat, and she quickly learned how to operate in a world where a hold-your-nose compromise was often the best-case scenario.

She had grown up in Toronto as a theater kid, attending a high school for the performing arts. Freedhoff took up science in college, taking a cue from her mother, who was a professor of theoretical physics. After Michal Freedhoff received a doctorate in chemistry in 1995, she moved to Washington and landed a job at the American Institute of Physics. There, she translated science into language that policymakers could understand, trying to protect basic research funding from a Republican drive to slice budgets.