In keeping with the promises he made while on the campaign trail, President Donald Trump has begun the process of shrinking the Environmental Protection Agency. It started on January 28, about a week after he was sworn in for his second term. That day, around 2 million employees across the federal government received an email saying they could either accept a “deal” to resign and receive eight months of pay or remain in their jobs and risk being laid off soon.
A few days later, on February 1, over 1,100 EPA workers, all of whom are still in the trial period of their positions, received a second email informing them that the administration has the right to immediately terminate them. While some of these employees are in their first year at the EPA, others had recently switched into new roles after spending decades in the agency.
The following week brought another blow. The new Trump-appointed management announced their plans to close the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights and place 168 of its employees on administrative leave.
Staffers that spoke to Grist under the condition of anonymity for fear of losing their jobs blamed new EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, and the director of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk, for the job-cutting measures.
Zeldin has said he is committed to protecting Americans’ clean air and water. But, as Margot Brown, the senior vice president of environmental justice and equity at the Environmental Defense Fund told Grist, he has offered no plan towards achieving that goal. “It is the height of irresponsibility. It is the height of inefficiency,” Brown said, referring to the Trump administration’s actions so far.
Steve Gilrein, who spent 40 years working in the air division of the EPA’s regional office in Dallas, before retiring in 2022, echoed Brown’s concerns and chalked the agency’s moves up to a public relations stunt. “It’s for a splash and I think it’s the wrong way to do it,” he told Grist. “I’m not saying the government can’t be more efficient. But I wish there was a plan that focused on keeping a healthy EPA that provides the services it’s meant to provide.”
Amid a storm of rhetoric about a bloated federal government, the events of the past two weeks raise questions about whether the EPA, an agency long plagued by budget and staff shortages, can continue to fulfill its legal obligations with a contracted workforce. Even before “efficiency” became the highest priority for federal agencies, the number of workers employed by the EPA had been declining for decades. “We’ve been steadily shrinking,” Gilrein said. “They just didn’t tell people.”
In the years after its founding in 1970, the EPA had only a few thousand staff members. Then, as the number of laws and programs under its purview grew — the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act — so did its workforce. The 1990s are often thought of as the agency’s golden years. During that decade, the workforce reached around 18,000 employees — a staffing apex that produced a flurry of new regulations for protecting the public from chemical dumping, tailpipe pollution, and petrochemical plant emissions.
Staff numbers then began a long decline. The EPA shrank the most dramatically during President Barack Obama’s administration, then further during Trump’s first term. Federalism, Gilrein explained, was the reason for the trend that has continued until this moment. Federal programs to ensure compliance with laws like the Clean Air Act were increasingly outsourced to the states to run. But, for agencies like the EPA, federalism must have a balance point; there are certain things that states can’t — or shouldn’t — do on their own.
During Trump’s first year and a half in office, approximately 1,600 workers, or 18 percent of the EPA workforce, left. The exodus caused widespread “brain drain” that continues to afflict some agency programs to this day. Nonetheless, Brown, who worked at the time in the agency’s Office of Children’s Health Protection, recalled that there continued to be some level of cooperation between Trump’s first term appointees and EPA staff. Structural changes handicapped certain offices, and the budget limped along, but many staff members were able to keep their heads low and do their jobs.
“There was an unbelievable amount of oversight because there was immense mistrust in the staff, but it was nothing like today,” Brown said.
President Biden’s four years in office amounted to a momentary aberration. Biden and his EPA administrator Michael Regan added hundreds of new staff members, advanced the federal climate policy objectives, and strengthened enforcement against companies in industrial corridors like Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley.” For as much promise as Biden and Regan brought, their approach angered conservative state politicians known to favor the oil and gas industry, resulted in a spate of lawsuits against the EPA, and set the stage for Trump’s second term.
Trump’s renewed mission to crush the agency promotes a severely limited type of federalism in which states have full power to administer the nation’s environmental laws as they please, with minimal oversight from the federal government. The problem with that approach, Gilrein said, is that it overlooks state environment agencies’ reliance on the EPA to fulfill practically every aspect of their mandates.
During his four decades in the Region 6 office, Gilrein said that federal staffers worked “hand in hand” with the states, offering everything from technical guidance on regulatory decisions to millions of dollars in federal grant money. Agency staffers, many of whom have advanced degrees in fields like chemical engineering and toxicology, simply have expertise that states cannot afford with their limited budgets, Gilrein said. He recalled that under Obama and the first Trump administration, the regional office maintained positive relationships with the states in its jurisdiction, often helping them review permits and plan inspections.
“We wanted our states to be as strong as they could be,” he said.
One current staff member in the air division told Grist that few colleagues he knew were even considering taking the “deal,” believing that it was legally dubious and a bullying tactic to spur mass resignations. Furthermore, he continued, it was insulting to the American public that he should be able to collect a government salary while doing nothing for eight months.
Trump and his appointees are explaining their early actions against the EPA as measures to spur economic growth. But current and former staff told Grist that the importance of the EPA will come into sharper focus when it is no longer able to fulfill the duties that staff have long dedicated themselves to.
For instance, the Office of Environmental Justice, which Trump recently announced would be closing, is responsible for administering billions of dollars in funds to communities on the front lines of the climate crisis. Under the previous Trump administration, the office had about 30 staff members; today, that number is over 160. If the plan to dismantle the office is seen through, Brown warned, “it will be impossible for those funds to be managed appropriately.”
Gilrein wondered aloud if Trump had been able to get away with a lot of his rhetoric about the agency because the services it provides have long been invisible to the public.
“Why are you celebrating the dismantling of an agency that’s proven critical to human health and the environment?” Gilrein asked. “You take for granted that you can drink the water out of your faucet. You can do that because of the EPA.”
