The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) plans to eliminate the Office of Scientific Research and will be able to fire more than 1,000 scientists and other employees who provide a scientific foundation for regulations protecting human health and ecosystems from environmental pollutants.
1,155 chemists, biologists, toxicologists and other scientists (75% of staff in the research program) could be fired, according to documents reviewed by Democrats on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.
The planned layoffs cast by the Trump administration as part of a broader push to reduce the size and make the federal government more efficient have been attacked by critics as a massive dismantling of the EPA's long-standing mission to protect public health and the environment.
The plan was first reported by the New York Times.
EPA administrator Lee Zeldin said he wants to eliminate 65% of the agency's budget. This is a massive spending reduction that requires large-scale reductions in jobs, including air and water quality monitoring, natural disaster response and reduction, among many other agencies' functions. The EPA has also issued guidance dictating that items that spend more than $50,000 must be approved from Elon Musk's so-called “government efficiency.”
The Research and Development Bureau, the EPA's main science division, currently has 1,540 positions except for special government officials and public health officials. A majority of staff in the 50% to 75% range “will not be retained,” the memo says.
The lab has 10 facilities that range from Florida and North Carolina to Oregon.
The plan calls for the lab to be disbanded and the remaining staff will be reassigned to the rest of the agency. EPA officials presented the plan to the White House for review.
EPA spokesperson Molly Vaseliou said the agency is “taking exciting steps as they enter the next phase of improving the organization,” but the changes have not been completed.
“We are committed to improving our ability to deliver clean air, water and land to all Americans,” she said, “While no decisions have been made, we are listening to employees at all levels and gathering ideas on how to increase efficiency and ensure that the EPA is more up-to-date and effective than ever.”
Zoe Lofgren, a California House of Representatives member of the Scientific Committee, said in a statement that the Congressional lab would be prepared by Congress and “exclude it from being illegal.”
Every decision made by the EPA “should promote human health and protection of the environment, and it cannot happen if it hinders EPA science,” Lofgren said.
“The EPA cannot fulfill its legal obligation to use the best science available without the (Research and Development Agency), and that's the point,” she added. President Donald Trump and his billionaire adviser Musk “have the bottom of the polluters' fellow polluters to American health and safety,” Lofgren said.
In his first term, “Trump and his peers politicized and distorted science,” she said. “Now, this is their attempt to kill it forever.”
Tycola Jones, chief science officer for the Environmental Group's Natural Resources Defense Council, said Trump's EPA “is putting polluters in people again.”
She called on Congress to “stood up and demand that the EPA keep scientists in the beat so that we can all get the clean water we deserve as we need.”
