President-elect Donald Trump’s Energy Department transition team has reportedly been asking for the names of civil servants that have worked on environmental policies under President Barack Obama, sparking fears of a coming “climate purge” by the incoming Trump administration.

A “document circulated by the Energy Department,” first reported by Bloomberg Thursday and later by Politico, lists 65 questions posed by the transition team. Some sought specific information on “employees and contractors who attended United Nations climate meetings, along with those who helped develop the Obama administration’s social cost of carbon metrics, used to estimate and justify the climate benefits of new rules,” Bloomberg reported.

“Sounds like a freaking witch hunt,” a former Energy staffer said in an email to Politico.

“Why is that important for informing the transition team?” a current Department of Energy (DOE) staffer told the news outlet, adding that “some [of the questions] are harassment, some are naïve, some are legitimate.”

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Sierra Club Global Climate Policy director John Coequyt did not mince words in his response to the reporting.

“It looks like Trump and his administration are planning a political witch hunt which has no place in American government,” Coequyt said, “purging or marginalizing anyone who has worked on the issue of climate change.

“And that’s at the same time they are looking for ways to eliminate the very scientific infrastructure we need to monitor changes to our planet and its climate,” he added, referring to the recent news that Trump would be eliminating all climate research at NASA. “You can’t purge physics from planet earth, and seas will keep rising regardless.”

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