Last Monday, Elon Musk bragged that he “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” Is the United States Environmental Protection Agency next?
A three-prong assault by the Trump administration is already taking shape, aimed at staffing, funding, and regulations.
According to a ProPublica analysis, more than 300 career employees at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have already left the agency since the election. This includes lawyers, engineers, biologists, toxicologists, emergency workers, and water and air quality experts. Last week, nearly 170 employees in the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights were placed on paid administrative leave. Many others are being encouraged to resign or threatened with dismissals.
President Trump signed an executive order in his first week in office pausing funding disbursements awarded through the Inflation Reduction Act or Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and although courts have intervened to stop the spending freeze, funding for EPA projects has still not been released.
And by all accounts, Lee Zeldin, the new EPA administrator, is poised to begin rolling back a suite of environmental regulations, touching on everything from meatpacking plant pollution and fertilizer chemicals to coal ash contamination and greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
To better understand everything going on at the agency and how these actions will reverberate over the next four years (and beyond), the Bulletin reached out to Mary Nichols, a former EPA assistant administrator and current professor at the UCLA Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.
Jessica S. McKenzie 