EPA hasn’t yet started furloughing or laying off the agency’s climate staff en masse.
But that may be coming.
The agency is expected to release its reorganization plan Friday afternoon, according to three EPA sources granted anonymity to discuss internal plans. It’s not clear whether that will give clarity about the scope of coming reductions.
But EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has said he aims to cut the budget by two-thirds, and agency leaders told employees with at least two program offices to to expect to hear more tomorrow at agency town halls.
Zeldin has promised he won’t fire employees who are needed to meet his agency’s “statutory obligations.” But the agency is trying to change those obligations to exclude the regulation of climate pollution.
That could leave EPA’s climate staff in the lurch as Zeldin moves to deeply slash the agency’s budget and workforce while redefining its mission.
The Trump administration has already put a substantial dent in EPA’s workforce, which stood at 14,700 employees in December.
Nearly 200 environmental justice staff have already been told their positions will be terminated as of July 31. Recently hired, “probationary” employees have been laid off. And documents leaked in March show potential plans to jettison the agency’s research arm and lay off the majority of its staff.
The administration has signaled deeper, broader cuts are on the way. On Monday, the agency sent all staff a second round of voluntary resignation and retirement offers — which is seen as a precursor for involuntary reductions in force. Agency staff say information sessions on those offers were well-attended.
And a recent Freedom of Information Act request by POLITICO’s E&E News revealed that the agency is in possession of more than a hundred pages of documents related to that overhaul, which EPA declined to release because it said the plans weren’t final.
The Biden EPA reported to Congress that in fiscal 2023, 1,138 full-time agency employees worked on climate. That head count has probably decreased already since Trump returned to office.
But many staff don’t work on climate issues exclusively — and experts say they will be needed if EPA is to meet its statutory obligations and the Trump administration wants to fulfill its deregulatory agenda.
Statutory obligations
Zeldin told reporters last week that the “perfect number” of EPA employees would be “not one more or one less than what we need to fulfill our statutory obligations, to fulfill our core mission, [and] to be able to power the great American comeback.”
He defined “core mission” as “protecting human health and the environment,” and he trumpeted the need for EPA to promote “energy dominance” and “permitting reform” while allowing states to set the floor on environmental safeguards.
But Zeldin did not explain what he meant by “statutory obligations” — and whether his definition includes agency staff working on climate change.
Asked to explain what Zeldin meant, EPA’s press office pointed to a commitment to “enhancing our ability to deliver clean air, water, and land for all Americans.”
“While no decisions have been made yet, we are working to implement important organizational improvements across the agency that will increase efficiency and ensure the agency is as up-to-date and effective as ever,” spokesperson Molly Vaseliou wrote in response to E&E News’ query.
Zeldin’s comments weren’t a one-off. He has emphasized the importance of meeting statutory obligations at Capitol Hill hearings and at a recent conference of state environmental agencies.
But Zeldin plans to restructure EPA as his agency also works feverishly to free itself from the statutory obligation to regulate climate pollution.
Zeldin has vowed to reconsider the scientific finding that led greenhouse gas emissions to be regulated under the Clean Air Act. If he’s successful, it could absolve the agency from the need to craft climate rules for cars, power plants, and oil and gas facilities to replace the Biden-era standards it plans to pull back.
It’s also a long, arduous undertaking.
“That will be months of administrative process and years of litigation,” said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.
Experts expect the Trump EPA will argue it has no “statutory obligation” to regulate for climate — except in some limited cases where Congress has directed the agency to do so explicitly, as it did in a 2020 statute that phased down heat-trapping chemicals used in refrigeration.
The Clean Air Act and its amendments don’t explicitly list the six main greenhouse gases. However, the statute creates a process by which EPA may determine that new pollutants endanger the public, which then triggers regulation of those pollutants. That’s the conclusion the agency came to in 2009 for planet-warming emissions.
That 2009 endangerment finding remains in full effect. Zeldin has committed to revise it through a regular rulemaking process with notice and public comment. That will require personnel.
“So, if they hold to their word of not dismissing people who are fulfilling statutory mandates, they will keep their climate people,” said Gerrard. “If they’re going to actually fulfill their promise of respecting core statutory obligations, that will take them a long time.”
Already understaffed?
Trump’s EPA has shown an appetite for cutting and furloughing staff who work on programs it doesn’t agree with.
Zeldin moved rapidly to terminate EPA’s environmental justice functions, which he said ran counter to the president’s directives against “diversity, equity and inclusion.” And the agency cut or furloughed staff overseeing a green banking program it is trying to terminate, including putting the program’s director on administrative leave.
But experts say the agency already needs more employees just to meet existing statutory deadlines.
Jen Duggan, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project, noted that staffing levels have declined since the early 2000s “even though the environmental and public health problems EPA is responsible for addressing are increasingly more complex.”
“I think the general feeling has been — and I think administrators from [Nixon EPA Administrator] Bill Ruckelshaus on have kind of lamented this — that Congress assigns a lot of duties to EPA to do, and hasn’t provided the staff to do them,” said Stan Meiburg, a former senior EPA career official who served as acting EPA deputy administrator under former President Barack Obama.
Congress usually doesn’t pass laws requiring agencies to maintain certain staffing levels for specific programs. Instead, it appropriates money and authorizes agencies to hire staff. Presidents are generally required to spend money Congress appropriates — though the stopgap bill Republicans passed to fund the federal government through September featured language that gave agencies like EPA an unusual degree of flexibility to cut program budgets.
But laws like the Clean Air Act do set schedules by which EPA must write and revise pollution standards — and EPA has routinely missed those because of a lack of staff. That includes congressionally mandated timelines for smog, soot and hazardous pollution — long seen as part of EPA’s “core mission.”
“I think you can make the argument that EPA has never had the staff to do all of the things that it was statutorily obligated to do,” said Meiburg, who is now on faculty at Wake Forest University. “You have to make choices. So, I would be cautious about making a statement that we can meet all our statutory obligations without a more thorough analysis of what those are and how many staff it takes to actually do them.”
EPA didn’t answer a question about how it had accounted for statutory deadlines in drafting its workforce reduction plans.
Remaking the air office
Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for the second Trump term that has proved influential during the president’s first 100 days back in office, envisions a remaking of EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation. The office currently houses the vast majority of EPA staff devoted to climate change — especially three suboffices devoted to planning and regulation, transportation emissions and “atmospheric protection.”
Trump’s pick to head the air office, Aaron Szabo, contributed to Project 2025’s EPA chapter, which was authored by first-term Trump EPA Chief of Staff Mandy Gunasekara. It argued that the agency’s climate policies were the work of “embedded activists” looking to usurp Congress’ policymaking authority.
“In recent decades, OAR and its statutory responsibilities under the Clean Air Act have been reimagined in an attempt to expand the reach of the federal government,” the chapter states.
The blueprint calls for OAR to shift away from greenhouse gas regulations and instead focus on “limiting and minimizing criteria and hazardous air pollutants in partnership with the states.”
The Trump administration has promised to jettison a slew of rules limiting planet-warming emissions. It claims its broad deregulatory push is supported by recent Supreme Court decisions that curtailed agency power, namely by eliminating a legal doctrine directing courts to defer to agencies’ interpretations of ambiguous laws.
But the administration’s roll back of rules will take time — and almost certainly face legal challenges.
Even at current staffing levels, EPA’s plans to overhaul numerous air, water and climate regulations simultaneously and quickly is “highly ambitious,” said Chris Grundler, a former senior EPA career official who once served as director of the Office of Atmospheric Protection.
“To properly revise established regulations requires experienced EPA policy, technical, and legal staff within OAR and [the Office of the General Counsel],” he said in an email to E&E News. “At reduced staffing levels and in the midst of disruptive reorganizations and Reductions in Force, it becomes impossible to accomplish all at once, and certainly not in the next two years.”
Grundler saw a “profound conflict” between Zeldin’s aim to cut his agency’s budget by nearly two-thirds and the Trump deregulatory agenda.
“It is highly unlikely that EPA can meet its statutory obligations under the Clean Air Act with the kind of reductions the administrator has been talking about, even if the remaining staff are highly motivated to work for the re-defined mission of the Trump EPA,” he said.
Reporter Ellie Borst contributed.
