Federal workers who once held energy and environment positions protecting national parks and public health or trying to bolster the electric grid to avoid disasters are heading for the exit as President Donald Trump’s campaign to shrink the government accelerates.
Scores of staffers who’ve recently left jobs at the Interior, Agriculture and Energy departments, as well as EPA, are landing on social networking platforms like LinkedIn, embracing the hashtag #OpenToWork to pitch themselves for new careers.
While Trump administration officials have applauded the staff downsizing as a much-needed curtailing of federal bloat, former and current employees say the overhaul is driving a historic loss of institutional knowledge. The losses could be hard to reverse, damaging the government’s ability to craft and implement energy and environmental policy for years to come, they warned. Potentially, the personnel losses could also undermine the president’s pursuit of his “energy dominance” agenda.
“You can’t understate the expertise and institutional knowledge we’re losing,” said one career staffer at the Department of Energy. “Directors and senior leaders who have run programs and offices that release hundreds of millions of dollars annually.”
The departed include those who’ve taken the Trump administration’s “deferred resignation” offers, as well as more traditional early retirement packages and voluntary separation buyouts. All of these incentives to leave government service have come as administration leaders warn employees they are eyeing big “reductions in force,” the government’s term for layoffs.
POLITICO’s E&E News spoke to more than a dozen people who’ve recently left, or are planning to leave, the government about the drain of experienced civil servants — from attorneys and researchers to career administrative leaders — and what those losses could mean for programs tied to energy, the environment and public health. They were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press or feared retribution from the Trump administration.
The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
After the first round of employees accepted the deferred resignation offer, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told NewsNation the administration would end up saving hundreds of millions of dollars. “We are saving taxpayers money at the end of the day,” she said. “This is going to make our government more efficient.”
An EPA spokesperson said the agency was remaking its operation as it embarked on reducing staff.
“We are actively listening to employees at all levels to gather ideas on how to better fulfill agency statutory obligations, increase efficiency, and ensure the EPA is as up-to-date and effective as ever,” spokesperson Molly Vaseliou said.
The staff losses are eye-popping. At the USDA, as many as 16,000 people are leaving the agency through the administration’s voluntary programs, GovExec reported. The DOE has yet to confirm how many staffers have opted to resign or retire early, but multiple career staffers watching the tally internally say the number is believed to have surpassed 3,200. Interior leadership has also shied away from releasing numbers. An estimated 2,700 Interior employees took the administration’s initial “Fork in the Road” deferred resignation offer, but the number of people leaving through additional voluntary separation programs has likely escalated in recent weeks at the more than 60,000-strong agency, according to staffers who spoke with E&E News.
At EPA, almost 550 employees jumped on the first deferred resignation option offered in January that allows them to go on paid leave through the end of the fiscal year in September and then leave the agency.
On Monday, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin opened the door to a second round of applications, accompanied by the opportunity for other employees to take early retirement, while staffers wait for cuts and restructuring.
Meanwhile, “it’s a nightmare, so many good people have left,” said one EPA employee. “And so many new people — the future — are cut.”
Interior
A sweep of resignations and retirements have emptied key leadership posts across Interior bureaus and agencies like the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service, forcing other employees to take on the managerial responsibilities in an “acting” capacity, according to internal documents viewed by E&E News.
In an April 18 memo, NPS acting Director Jessica Bowron said key leadership roles at the agency were “undergoing transitions” as a result of voluntary resignations and retirements.
The memo shows 46 percent of the agency’s top leadership posts are currently in this state of limbo. Posts that have been temporarily filled include the deputy director of management and administration, four of the service’s seven regional directors and chief of the Office of International Affairs — that post is temporarily being filled by a former executive assistant to the NPS director.
Bowron herself is the longtime comptroller for NPS but is filling in as director until Congress confirms a Trump nominee for the job.
The Interior Department declined to comment for this story.
Not all positions with temporary leaders were vacated due to the Trump administration’s reorganization efforts. Changes in administration often lead to exits from key positions atop executive agencies. Additionally, staffing at NPS has been a perennial challenge noted by park advocates and ex-leaders. For example, the deputy for congressional and external affairs post has been vacant since Mike Reynolds retired last year.
Still, a bleed of employees in high positions appears to be occurring across national park lands. NPS is trying to speed-hire 36 leadership positions in national parks across the country, mostly for superintendents and park managers, that are currently vacant, according to an April 21 email to the agency’s leadership from NPS’s deputy director of operations, Frank Lands.
Those posts were open for “lateral” hiring, at an accelerated rate, meaning existing NPS workers could seek to take the roles. The posts include the deputy superintendent of Yosemite National Park.
The rushed effort to fill emptying seats underscores Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s pledge to keep parks open to the public and preserve services, despite changes in Washington. It also comes on the heels of Burgum ordering the centralizing of administrative positions at Interior in the Washington headquarters, in a flip from the long-standing norm that agencies like the Bureau of Land Management or the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management would retain their own computer technicians, personnel managers and communications staff in the field.
That move, which is expected to squeeze federal jobs outside of the nation’s capital, is being led by Tyler Hassen, an acting Interior assistant secretary who initially joined the department as part of the Elon Musk-driven “Department of Government Efficiency.”
The FWS is also grappling with exiting staff, with 21 of its top 41 leadership posts currently filled with “acting” employees, according to an internal FWS document dated April 21 that was viewed by E&E News. Acting roles include the agency’s two deputy director posts, jobs that assist the director in managing the day-to-day operations of the service.
A veteran Interior employee said what’s been notable about the shrinking staff is that people are simply disappearing quietly, without announcements to other members of the team or mention of their years of service.
“They’re just walking out the door and nothing’s being said,” the employee said. “A lot of good people, excellent leaders.”
The Interior employee, who took a buyout, said the Trump administration is likely harming its own agenda by eliminating scores of federal employees who have the experience politicians need to implement policy. They likened the effort to tearing apart a machine before you need to use it.
“Everything they’re going to try to do is going to crash,” they said.
Energy Department
Thousands of workers leaving the DOE are spread across the department, working on bolstering the U.S. electric grid, deploying renewables, meeting national climate goals and even building out Trump’s own agenda around supply chains.
Career staffers inside the agency say the losses are hitting policy offices hard, even those like DOE’s Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains, which works on supply chains, manufacturing and building out critical mineral capacity.
One DOE career staffer who recently left their post said such a large number of employees leaving will put “enormous pressure” on those who remain and curtail the ability of department programs to function properly.
“Generally people had a lot of work anyways, it’s not like everyone had a lot of slack time,” said the staffer.
DOE did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The department has said employees in critical jobs are not eligible for the various buyouts and would be exempt from the impending layoffs.
Reduced staffing also endangers the Trump administration’s stated energy goals, from energy dominance to affordability to securing domestic supply chains, they said, adding that large capital-intensive projects for high-priority technologies like nuclear and geothermal rely heavily on DOE support.
“Entire teams are gone, like the entire IT team for [DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy],” said a current DOE staffer. “We … lost many contracting, procurement and financial assistance experts, which means any office funding [research and development] now has far less project management capacity and expertise.
“Anyone left will be so overwhelmed and have little bandwidth to manage projects, and that combined with the expertise lost will not set us up well to prevent waste, fraud and abuse like the administration claims they want,” said the staffer. The gutting of fellowship programs combined with retirements and workers quitting will also cut off younger staffers who would have risen through the federal ranks, they said.
Another current career employee pointed to departures from DOE’s Office of Policy as undermining the president’s own agenda.
“A group of folks who were experts on energy project permitting and built tools to make energy permitting more efficient are leaving,” said the staffer. “This will cause us to lose expertise [around] how to effectively develop permitting policy to build energy projects of all kinds and will make addressing the administration’s goal of reducing permitting times more difficult.”
EPA
As the agency dangles a new round of incentives to encourage voluntary employee exits, those who remain describe a mood of pervasive anxiety.
“The worry is very distracting,” one employee in the agency’s Office of Research and Development (ORD) said. “That being said — folks are working through it.”
But as the Trump administration heralds plans for an unparalleled series of regulatory rollbacks, one former top official predicts that the exodus could hamstring efforts to turn that agenda into reality.
“It’s going to be very difficult to get anything done,” said Stan Meiburg, whose 39-year career at the agency included a stint as acting deputy administrator from 2014 to 2017.
The rollbacks envisioned by Zeldin will entail a series of rulemakings to replace the Biden-era regulations that have been targeted.
If the people with the expertise to guide those rulemakings are no longer there, it will be more difficult for the administration to achieve its objectives without the courts throwing out the replacement rules on the grounds that they are “arbitrary and capricious,” said Meiburg, now executive director of the Andrew Sabin Family Center for Environment and Sustainability at Wake Forest University,
Vaseliou, the EPA spokesperson, pointed to an earlier Zeldin statement that the agency “does not want one more or less” employee than needed to do its job.
Still looming is a potentially drastic agency downsizing. Under a restructuring plan that was supposed to be submitted to the White House two weeks ago, EPA had to include areas that could be subject to “large-scale” reductions in force.
While Zeldin stressed last week that no final decisions had been made, ORD may be especially vulnerable. One EPA proposal made public by Democrats on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee calls for the office to be shuttered as a stand-alone entity, with the expectation that up to three-quarters of its roughly 1,500 employees “will not be retained.”
“There is nothing good about this,” the ORD staffer said. The expertise of employees with decades of experience “was built to keep people in this country healthy, and their taxes paid for it,” the staffer added. “Losing these folks is the waste.”
USDA
In total, the USDA plans to eventually slash as many as 30,000 workers.
So far, deferred resignations and retirements have hit the Forest Service especially hard, according to current employees.
When asked about how many people have left, a USDA spokesperson said the agency is reviewing the numbers.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, USDA is being transparent about plans to optimize and reduce our workforce and to return the Department to a customer service focused, farmer first agency. We have a solemn responsibility to be good stewards of Americans’ hard-earned taxpayer dollars and to ensure that every dollar is being spent as effectively as possible to serve the people,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
The USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service lost its coordinator for the sage grouse initiative, Tim Griffiths, whose last day was last week, said Robert Bonnie, former undersecretary for farm production and conservation in the Biden administration.
Speaking to the North American Agricultural Journalists on Monday, Bonnie said he worries many other senior employees are on the way out as well, including Forest Service employees qualified to work on wildfire mitigation.
While some employees, such as firefighters, are exempt from the deferred resignations and early retirements, many more offices are losing employees. The USDA’s senior civil servant in the communications office, Brian Mabry, is retiring; he received an ovation at the agricultural journalists’ annual reception in Washington on Monday night.
Reporter Marc Heller contributed.
