EPA Continues to Dismantle Environmental Justice Office, Announces Plans to Terminate Nearly 300 Employees

The Monday announcement also said 175 additional employees in the office would be reassigned within the agency.

The Trump administration has taken another step toward stripping the government’s ability to tackle environmental pollution and its dangerous health effects in historically disadvantaged and overburdened communities.

In a notice issued to employees late Monday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said 280 staffers who work in the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights in Washington or who do that work in regional offices would be laid off at the end of July. An additional 175 employees who “perform statutory functions or support the agency’s core mission were reassigned to other offices,” an agency spokesperson said.

The notices follow the agency’s decision in February to place nearly 170 employees in the office—which it intends to close—on administrative leave. The agency did not clarify if these 170 employees, some of whom were recalled back into the office in March, were among those affected by Monday’s notices.

The moves fall in line with President Donald Trump’s executive order, issued in February, to end programs that address harms in communities that suffer from historic and continuing pollution. 

“EPA is taking the next step to terminate the Biden-Harris Administration’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Environmental Justice arms of the agency,” said Molly Vaseliou, an agency spokesperson, in a statement Tuesday.

The steps are being taken in “accordance with the Office of Personnel Management Workforce Reshaping Handbook and federal regulations governing RIF [reduction in force] procedures,” Vaseliou said, adding, “This is the first step in a broader effort to ensure that EPA is best positioned to meet its core mission of protecting human health and the environment and Powering the Great American Comeback.”

Environmental groups immediately slammed the agency for the moves, citing an ongoing lack of transparency and questioning how firing people who have worked to reduce health impacts in polluted communities serves the agency’s “core mission.”

“Everything is so chaotic and confusing,” said Matthew Tejada, senior vice president of environmental health for the Natural Resources Defense Council, who was the director of the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice for nearly a decade, right before it was combined with the office that oversees environmental civil-rights complaints. 

“We’re not sure how many people are being affected, where or why,” Tejada added.“There’s an incredibly thick smoke screen around what EPA is doing. I bet even people in the White House are having a hard time understanding what EPA is up to.”

In February, the administration said it plans to cut the agency’s spending by 65 percent. 

“The core mission of EPA is supposed to be protecting human health and the environment,” said Mahyar Sorour, the director of the Beyond Fossil Fuels policy group at the Sierra Club. “This is going after the core mission of the agency and it’s really disappointing that they’re going after these hard-working civil servants.”

These latest cuts and reassignments were announced on the eve of the 55th Earth Day. The administration touted its environmental accomplishments in several statements, as public health advocates decried its intensified efforts to dismantle environmental and climate policies.

In a statement issued Tuesday the White House blasted the previous administration for wasting “billions of taxpayer dollars on virtue signaling and ineffective grifts.” The statement celebrated the administration’s “sound forest management”—which critics say will open millions of acres to destructive industrial logging—and the end of “the forced use of paper straws,” among other measures.

In the days leading up to Earth Day, tens of thousands of Americans protested the administration’s handling of environmental and climate policies, which have included pulling the United States out of the Paris climate accord for a second time, undermining federal scientific research and proposing to undo the “endangerment finding,” which requires the agency to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

“This administration continues to attack bedrock environmental laws,” Sorour said.

Cover photo:  Demonstrators march during a rally outside the EPA offices on Tuesday in Ann Arbor, Mich. Credit: Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty Images