EPA Staff Stands Firm in the Face of Administration Attacks
Despite brickbats, bullying and budget cuts, agency employees persevere
Neither Lee Zeldin, nor Elon Musk, nor Donald Trump could possibly look Brian Kelly in the eye to tell him to his face that he is lazy.
They cannot tell Kayla Butler she is crooked.
They dare not accuse Luis Antonio Flores of lollygagging on the golf course.
If Zeldin, Musk or Trump knew a scintilla about them, they would not dare froth at the mouth with their stereotypes about federal civil servants. All three work in Region 5 of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), responsible for pollution monitoring, cleanups, community engagement, and emergency hazardous waste response for Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin.
Historically the Midwest is so saturated with manufacturing that just those six states generated a quarter of the nation’s hazardous waste back in the 1970s, and it is still today home to a quarter of the nation’s facilities reporting to the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory Program. When I recently visited Region 5’s main office in Chicago, one enforcement officer, who did not give her name because of the sensitivity of her job, told me there are still toxic sites where “we show up [and] neither the state nor the EPA has ever been [there] to check.”
Coincidentally, I visited the Region 5 office the same week the Trump administration and Zeldin, Trump’s new EPA administrator, announced they planned to cut 65 percent of the agency’s budget. Zeldin has since then dropped even more bombshells in a brazen attempt to gut the nation’s first line of defense against the poisoning of people, the polluting of the environment, and the proliferation of global warming gases.
Zeldin announced on March 12 that he plans to take more than 30 actions to weaken or revoke air, water, wastewater and chemical standards, eliminate the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, and get the EPA out of the business of curbing carbon dioxide and methane, the gases fueling global warming. Despite the recent record oil production that put United States atop the world, Zeldin said he was throttling regulations that are “throttling the oil and gas industry.”
But that’s not all. Last week, The New York Times reported the EPA is considering firing half to three-quarters of its scientists (770 to 1,155 out of 1,540) and closing the Office of Research and Development, the agency’s scientific research office. Zeldin justified the cuts in part by deriding many EPA programs as “left-wing ideological projects” and bragged that he is “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.”
Impact of cuts felt deeply
Riffing on Zeldin’s comment, Kelly, Butler, Flores and many others I talked with in Region 5 said the administration’s plans are a bayonet ripping out the heart and soul of their mission. They all spoke on the condition that they were talking as members of their union, Local 704 of the American Federation of Government Employees. Nicole Cantello, union president and an EPA attorney, said the attacks on her members are unlike anything she’s seen in her more than 30 years with the agency. As much as prior conservative administrations may have criticized the agency, there’s never been one—until now—that tried to “fire everybody.”
Flores, a chemist who analyzes air, water and soil samples for everything from lead to PCBs, said a decimated EPA means less scrutiny for another Flint water crisis, fewer eyeballs on Superfund sites, and limited ability to investigate toxic contamination after train derailments, such as the disaster two years ago in East Palestine, Ohio. “And we have a Great Lakes research vessel that tests the water across all the lakes,” he added. “It’s important for drinking water, tourism and fishing. If we get crippled, all that goes into question.”
Butler is a community involvement coordinator who works with the Superfund program to inform communities about remediation efforts. She was deeply concerned that urban neighborhoods and rural communities will be denied the scientific resources to adequately address the horrors of environmental injustice. Superfund sites, the legacy of toxic chemicals used in manufacturing, military operations, mining and landfills, are so poisonous, they can have cumulative, compound effects on affected communities, triggering many diseases. A 2023 EPA inspector general report concluded that the agency needs stronger policies, guidance, and performance measures to “assess and address cumulative impacts and disproportionate health effects on overburdened communities.”
Butler is afraid that cumulative impact assessments will not happen if the Trump administration cuts the EPA budget. “It’s a clear story that they’re trying to erase,” she said.
For Kelly, an on-site emergency coordinator based in Michigan, weakening safeguards and erasing the story of environmental harms will have an obvious result. “People will die,” he said. “There will be additional deaths if we roll back these protections.”
What these workers also fear is the slow death of spirit to be civil servants.
Start with Kelly.
I talked to him from Chicago by telephone because he was in Los Angeles County, deployed to help clean up after the devastating Eaton Fire that killed 17 people and destroyed more than 9,400 structures.
Between the Eaton Fire and the Palisades Fire, which took another 12 lives and destroyed another 6,800 buildings, the EPA conducted what it says was the largest wildfire hazardous materials cleanup in the history of the agency, and likely the most voluminous lithium battery removal in world history, primarily from the electric and hybrid vehicles and home battery storage people left behind when they fled.
“It’s one thing to be able go out and respond to these emergencies, but you have to have attorneys on your side,” Kelly said. “You’ve got to have enforcement specialists behind you. You’ve got to have people who are experts in drinking water and air. You can’t just have one person out there on an island by themselves.”
Freezing out staffers
Butler wonders if entire communities will become remote islands, surrounded by rising tide of pollution. The very morning of our interview, she was informed she was one of the thousands of federal workers across the nation who had their government purchase cards frozen by Elon Musk, Trump’s destroyer of federal agencies. When launching the freeze, Musk claimed with no evidence, “A lot of shady expenditures happening.”
Butler threw shade on that, saying the purchase system is virtually foolproof with multiple layers of vetting and proof of purchase. She uses her purchase card to buy ads and place public notices in newspapers to keep communities informed about remediation of Superfund sites.
She has also used her card to piece together equipment to fit in a van for a mobile air monitor. The monitor assists with compliance, enforcement, and giving communities a read on possible toxic emissions and dust from nearby industrial operations.
“I literally bought the nuts and bolts that feed into this van that allow the scientists to measure all the chemicals, all the air pollution,” Butler said. “I remember seeing the van for the first time after I bought so many things for years. And I was like ‘Wow this is real!’”
Not only was the van real, but air monitoring in general, along with soil monitoring— particularly in places like heavily polluted Southeast Chicago—has been a critical tool of environmental justice projects to get rid of mountains of petcoke dust and detect neurotoxic manganese dust in the air and lead in backyards.
“Air monitoring created so much momentum for the community and community members to say, ‘This is what we need,’” Butler said.
Staff stifled, heartbroken
The culture of fear is particularly stifling for one staffer who did not want to give her name because she is an agency liaison to elected officials. Before Zeldin took over, she would get an email from an elected official asking if funding for a project was still on track and “30 seconds later,” she said, the question would be answered.
Her job “is all about relationships,” keeping officials informed about projects. Now, she said just about everything she depends on to do her job has come to a halt. “Everyone’s afraid to say anything, answer emails, put anything in writing without getting approval,” she said. “Just mass chaos all the way to the top.”
Relationships are being upset left and right according to other staffers. One set of my interviews was with three EPA community health workers who fear they are betraying the communities they serve because their contact with them has fluctuated during the first months of the Trump administration. They have had to shift from silence to delicately dancing around any conversation that mentions environmental justice or diversity, equity and inclusion.
None of them wanted to be named because they did not want to jeopardize the opportunity to find ways to serve communities that have suffered toxic pollution for decades because of racism and classism.
“Literally since January 20, my entire division has been on edge,” said one. “We kind of feel like we’re in the hot seat. A lot of people working on climate are afraid. If you’re working with [people with] lower to moderate income or [places] more populated by people of color, you’re afraid because you don’t want to send off any flags to the administration.”
The tiptoeing is heartbreaking for the three health workers because they see firsthand families poisoned by chemicals the EPA has been regulating. One of the workers has painful memories of seeing the “devastated” look on mothers’ faces when giving them the results of their child’s lead tests that were well above the hazardous limit. “I feel like I made a promise to them that I would be there for what they needed,” she said. “And I feel like I’ve been forced to go back on that promise.”
Remembering their mission boosts morale
Despite Zeldin’s attacks and Trump’s baseless rants—including the ludicrous accusation he made during his campaign that “crooked” and “dishonest” federal workers were “destroying this country”—EPA staffers are far from caving in. Nationally, current and former EPA staff last week published an open letter to the nation that said, “We cannot stand by and allow” the administration’s assault on environmental justice programs.
In Region 5, the workers’ union has been trying to keep morale from tanking by hosting town halls, trivia nights, lunch learning sessions, and happy hours. In a day of quiet defiance, many of the 1,000 staffers wore stickers in support of laid-off probationary employees that read, “Don’t Fire New Hires.” Several of the people I interviewed said that if Zeldin and the Trump administration really cared about waste and inefficiency, they would not try to fire tens of thousands of probationary workers across the federal system.
One noted how the onboarding process, just to begin her probationary year, took five months. “It wastes all this money onboarding them and then eliminating them,” she said. “That’s totally abusing taxpayer dollars, if you ask me. It’s hard enough to get people to work here. We’re powered by smart people who went to school for a long time and could make a lot of money elsewhere.” She’s right. Federal staffers with advanced degrees make 29 percent less, on average, than their counterparts in the private sector, according to a report last year by the Congressional Budget Office.
Individually, several said they maintained their morale by remembering why they came to the EPA in the first place. Flores, whose love for public service was embedded in him growing up in a military family, said, “I didn’t want to make the next shampoo” with his chemistry degrees. “I didn’t want to make a better adhesive for a box…. The tangible mission of human health and environmental health is very important me.”
The enforcement officer who wanted to remain anonymous talked about a case where she worked with the state to monitor lead in a fenceline community near a toxic industrial facility. Several children were discovered to have elevated levels of lead in their blood.
“People’s lives are in my hands,” she said. “When we realized how dire the circumstance was, we were able to really speed up our process by working with the company, working with the state, and getting a settlement done quick. And now all those fixes are in place. The lead monitoring has returned back to safe levels, and we know that there aren’t going to be any more kids impacted by this facility.”
One of the community health workers I interviewed said her mission means so much to her because at 9 years old she lost her mother to breast cancer after she was exposed to the solvent trichloroethylene (TCE). That carcinogen is used in home, furniture and automotive cleaning products. The Biden administration banned TCE in its final weeks, but the Trump administration has delayed implementation.
“The loss of her rippled throughout our community,” the worker said, referencing her mother. “She was active in our church, teaching immigrants in our city how to read. The loss of her had such a large impact.” If the EPA were gutted, she added, so many people like her mother would be lost too soon. “We play critical roles beyond just laws and regulations,” she said. “We do serve vital functions for communities based on where the need is the most.”
The same worker worried that if an agency as critical to community health as the EPA can be slashed to a shell of itself, there is no telling what is in store next for the nation. “I know people don’t have a lot of sympathy for bureaucrats,” she said. “But I think what is happening to us is a precursor to what happens to the rest of the country. We’re supposed to be this nonpartisan force that’s working for the American people, and attacks to that is a direct attack on the American people.”
One of her co-workers seconded her, saying, “We’re fighting for the American people and we are the American people. We all began this job for a reason. We all have our ‘why.’ And that hasn’t changed just because the administration has changed, because there’s some backlash or people coming after us. Just grounding yourself with people whose ‘why’ is the same as yours helps a lot.”
A longer, unabridged version of this article originally ran on The Equation, the Union of Concerned Scientists’ blog.
Derrick Z. Jackson is a Union of Concerned Scientists fellow, a former columnist at the Boston Globe, and author and photographer of “Project Puffin” (Yale University Press, 2015) and “The Puffin Plan” (Tumblehome Books, 2020) on the restoration of puffins in Maine.