Copyright Inside Climate News
The Trump administration moved Monday to slash federal jobs across two key environmental and conservation agencies, targeting employees who work on scientific research and the enforcement of anti-pollution laws. At the Environmental Protection Agency, staff received a new round of furlough notices as funding dwindles amid the government shutdown. The Department of the Interior disclosed plans to permanently cut more than 2,000 positions, according to a court filing by its chief personnel officer. The Interior Department layoffs, also known as a Reduction in Force, are at the center of ongoing litigation over President Donald Trump and his administration’s efforts to further gut the federal workforce. Monday’s filing came in response to a judge’s order requiring the Interior Department to disclose its layoff plans for unionized employees. The administration said it intends to eliminate 2,050 Interior Department positions, a decision made before the government shutdown began. That timing contradicts Trump’s recent claim that government layoffs stemmed from the shutdown. Most of the planned cuts would hit the U.S. Geological Survey, the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service’s regional offices and Interior’s main headquarters, according to the filing. The Interior Department manages national parks, wildlife refuges and other public lands. It oversees environmental and wildlife conservation, fulfills trust obligations to Alaska Natives and Native American tribes and conducts scientific research on endangered species, water resources and natural hazards like flooding and wildfires so officials can better respond to them. Those research positions would be especially hard hit by the planned layoffs, including projects focused on the Great Lakes ecosystems and the USGS Columbia Environmental Research Center in Missouri, where scientists study toxic contaminants such as PFAS, a class of chemicals Trump’s health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has pledged to address. Neither the White House nor the Interior Department responded to requests for comment. Environmental groups described the move as part of a broader campaign by Trump and his administration to eliminate research and data collection on environmental contamination after carrying out what EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin called the largest rollback of environmental protections in U.S. history. “This plan would eviscerate the core science that every American depends on,” said Jennifer Rokala, executive director of the conservation group the Center for Western Priorities, in a statement about the new Interior Department cuts revealed Monday. Rokala said the planned cuts “would devastate scientific research across the Rocky Mountains, Great Plains, and Great Lakes,” while harming workers who “make our parks and public lands the envy of the world.” Rokala also said that Monday’s filing revealed only the planned layoffs for unionized employees: “We don’t know how many non-union offices and positions are also on the chopping block.” At the EPA, the new furlough notices arrived as the agency’s funding dries up. Last week, Trump said the shutdown was an opportunity to dismantle “Democrat programs that we want to close up or we never wanted to happen.” He has repeatedly cast environmental protection, conservation and related public health issues as “woke” and left-wing. Some of the country’s key environmental protections, and in fact the EPA itself, date back to the Republican Nixon administration. “Only Trump’s EPA would lay off the people who protect our kids from breathing polluted air and drinking contaminated water but keep the pesticide office open to greenlight more poisons,” said J.W. Glass, EPA policy specialist at the conservation organization Center for Biological Diversity. Glass, in a written statement, accused the administration of using the shutdown to dismantle the EPA, leaving “our communities paying the price.” The EPA did not respond to a request for comment and a request for details about the number of furlough notices sent and which offices they impact. In a written statement, Peter Murchie, senior director at the nonprofit Environmental Protection Network and a former EPA official, called on Congress to intervene and stop the “systematic dismantling.” “The health harms facing American families—cancer, childhood asthma, infertility, organ failure—don’t pause for politics,” Murchie said. “When EPA’s expert staff are sent home, large parts of the agency’s work simply stop.”
