EPA staff fear Trump will destroy how it protects Americans from pollution

After several years of recovery after the tumult of Donald Trump’s last administration, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is now bracing itself for even deeper cuts to staff numbers and to work protecting Americans from pollution and the climate crisis as Trump prepares to return to the White House.

When he was last president, Trump gutted more than 100 environmental rules and vowed to only leave a “little bit of the EPA” left “because you can’t destroy business”, prompting hundreds of agency staff to leave amid a firestorm of political interference and retaliation against civil servants. An even greater exodus is expected this time, with staff fearing they are frontline targets in what could be the biggest upheaval in the agency’s 50-year history.

“People are anxious and apprehensive, [and] we are preparing for the worst,” said Nicole Cantello, an EPA water specialist and president of AFGE Local 704, representing agency staff in the midwest.

“We’ve had a taste of what will happen and how we were targeted last time,” she said. “By the emails and texts I’m getting, a lot of people will leave. So many things could be thrown at us that it could destroy the EPA as we know it.”

Cantello said the union is already seeking to shield itself by departing its office at the agency’s Washington headquarters, ditching the use of EPA computers and divorcing union dues from the federal payroll system. “We have to try to protect our people by being independent of the agency,” she said. “But folks will have to take stock over whether they can endure the attacks that are going to come their way.”

Such anxiety stems from the experiences of the last Trump administration, which removed a broad sweep of environmental regulations and attempted to cut the agency’s budget by a third.

Many of the nation’s water utilities have opposed PFAS and lead limits in drinking water. Photograph: NurPhoto/Getty Images

Some staff in the way of this agenda faced censure, with a recent inspector general report finding that scientists were encouraged to delete evidence of chemicals’ harms, such as cancer and miscarriage. At least three of these scientists, when they objected, were removed from their roles, the report found, with supervisors calling dissenters “stupid” and “piranhas”.

The incoming Trump administration will seek to refashion the EPA workforce by using a mechanism called Schedule F, which allows a president to purge the agency of expert staffers and replace them with political loyalists, and relocating regional offices. Many of the EPA’s aging workforce, meanwhile, may choose to retire, with around a third of the agency’s workforce eligible to do this.

Trump’s allies have promised an assault on those who stay. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains,” Russell Vought, who served as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, said in a recent speech.

“We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.”

The EPA currently has more than 16,000 employees, adding more than 6,000 during Joe Biden’s administration as the agency sought to rebuild. During Biden’s term, the agency stepped up enforcement of pollution rules, banned toxic pesticides, bolstered chemical safety protections, and took aim at the climate crisis by drawing up new regulations to slash planet-heating emissions from cars, trucks and power plants.

Much of this work now faces demolition. Project 2025, the conservative manifesto authored by former Trump officials, calls for the elimination of entire offices within the EPA, such as those that deal with environmental justice and pollution enforcement, as well as speeding up approvals of chemicals and scaling back regulations.

“It’s going to be a complete meltdown because the Trump people have learned what to do and they are more radical this time,” said Tim Whitehouse, executive director of the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. “They’ve been transparent about [their] desire to fire those who disagree with their agenda. Loyalty will be the No 1 factor in civil service jobs.”

In a memo circulated to staff on Wednesday, Michael Regan, the EPA’s administrator, acknowledged the “fear and uncertainty” over the election’s consequences. “May we approach our work with compassion and grace, and may we use the remaining days of this administration to continue to advance our mission and ensure that communities across this country have clean air to breathe and clean water to drink,” he wrote.

The EPA under Biden took several steps to improve water quality and rein in toxic chemical pollution. It implemented strong drinking water limits for toxic PFAS and lead, including a requirement to replace the nation’s municipal lead lines.

The agency also designated two of the most common PFAS as hazardous substances, which should make industry financially responsible for some clean-up. Under two new proposed rules, chemical makers would face stronger scrutiny for new PFAS and other toxic chemicals, and an EPA enforcement official told the Guardian the agency had just this year recovered from previous Trump administration chaos.

Trump will kill, undo or otherwise attempt to sabotage the progress, said Betsy Southerland, a former EPA water division manager. “It’s heartbreaking,” she said. “We’re going to lose another four years.”

The new chemical review rules are only proposed and can be quickly killed by the next administration. Trump’s EPA will almost certainly attempt to repeal the lead and PFAS drinking water rules, as it previously did with similar regulations, Southerland said.

The EPA early this year gave water utilities five years instead of the usual three to meet the new PFAS limits, so many of the nation’s water systems have not begun complying with the rules, nor have most begun replacing lead lines.

Many of the nation’s water utilities have opposed the PFAS and lead limits in drinking water, claiming they are too expensive to implement, and offer little societal benefit. Industry players Trump is likely to appoint to the EPA take the same position. However, the process to repeal can take four years, and the previous Trump administration’s attempts to shorten the timeline often resulted in courts overturning the repeals because the EPA did not follow the law, Southerland said.

Project 2025 and industry players involved with the first administration have outlined plans to more broadly kneecap the agency’s toxic chemical regulation program. They have proposed scrapping the EPA’s system for assessing chemicals’ health risks, and halting research on any chemicals for which there is no congressional authorization.

“With the last Trump administration there were some appointees that were responsible and rational,” said Stan Meiburg, a former acting deputy administrator of the EPA. “Those people have said they are not coming back, so instead it will just be people with an ideological agenda. It will be worse than last time.”