President Donald Trump’s EPA has slashed its workforce while maintaining critical agency operations despite the Democrat shutdown.
The Democrat shutdown is rapidly approaching one month long, and the Trump administration has worked to ensure critical operations continue. At the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Administrator Lee Zeldin enacted a contingency plan to ensure that they can continue to deliver for the American people.
An EPA spokesman told Breitbart News:
The Trump EPA is committed to protecting the environment and ensuring America has the cleanest air, land and water in the world while growing our economy, but Democrats are content to allow our funding to run out. They are preventing us from securing funding needed to continue these important programs and impeding our ability to deliver clean air, land, and water for Americans.
They are prioritizing their own radical policy agenda that could undermine both environmental progress and economic stability in pursuit of their $1.5 trillion poison-packed wish list at the expense of the American people.
“Congressional Democrats can end this shutdown right now by voting for our clean, bipartisan funding extension instead of playing political games,” the spokesman concluded.
According to the EPA’s contingency plan for a shutdown, the agency would continue:
- Protection of EPA land, buildings, equipment, and protection of research
- Law enforcement and criminal investigations
- Emergency and disaster assistance
- Superfund response work
- EPA’s emergency response readiness operations
On the obverse side, there will be many significant agency operations that will lapse due to the Democrat shutdown, including:
- Issuing new grants or interagency agreements
- Civil enforcement inspections
- Approvals of pending state requests, such as authorized/delegated state-issued EPA permits, SIPs, TMDLs, Water Quality Standards
The EPA has managed to carry out a number of accomplishments despite the Democrat shutdown, including:
- Updated lead guidance to accelerate cleanup of superfund, hazardous waste sites across the country
- Issued policy guidance to prevent wildfires and promote use of prescribed fires for risk mitigation
- Entered into a consent order with Louisiana-based Smitty’s Supply Inc, requiring the company to take responsibility for cleanup at a facility damaged by an August fire and pay certain response costs incurred by the United States government
- Struck a first-ever memorandum of understanding between the EPA and Virginia Agriculture Forge for agricultural practices that benefit the environment
- Began removing hazardous waste from former Glycerin Traders in La Porte, Indiana
- Approved blueprint for cleanup of Berry’s Creek in Bergen County, New Jersey
- Completed Dededo Transfer Station Removal Action, removing roughly 31,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil from heavy metals
The EPA carried out these actions while issuing furloughs that have drastically reduced the number of bureaucrats working at the EPA.
The EPA is slated to reduce its workforce from 16,421 full-time employees to roughly 12,500 by the end of 2025, which aligns with the goal as stipulated by President Donald Trump’s 2026 budget request. In addition, the agency has saved taxpayers $29 billion by canceling or reducing grants, contracts, and other spending.
“I’m worried that I and other furloughed employees will be RIFed,” one EPA staffer said, referring to a reduction-in-force (RIF), which is the permanent elimination of a position rather than a temporary furlough.
“I’d rather go hungry than lose our democracy. I refuse to stay quiet and let them use us feds as an excuse to accept a bad deal,” another employee said.
“We’ve been intentional and aggressive in establishing a structure to ensure EPA is focused on statutory obligations &
Presidential priorities, not the overreach of the previous administration,” EPA spokesperson Brigit Hirsch told E&E News.
She added, “There is zero uncertainty at EPA about what we are working on and who is advancing these priorities.”