President-elect Donald Trump’s first term in office was hard on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which assesses risks to human health and the environment. Political appointees meddled in science-based decisions and its workforce eroded. Now, agency scientists and outside observers fear a repeat, or worse. The upheaval “is going to be swift and unprecedented,” predicts Matthew Tejada of the Natural Resources Defense Council, who left EPA last year. “They really are scared,” toxicologist Dan Costa, who retired from EPA in 2018, says of the agency researchers he’s in touch with.
Last week, Trump announced Lee Zeldin, a former congressional representative from New York, as his pick to lead the agency. Zeldin’s environmental record is scant and mixed. Along with 22 other Republicans, Zeldin voted to create drinking water standards for some “forever chemicals”—the per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) that contaminate much of the nation’s groundwater. He also voted against Trump’s plan to expand offshore oil and gas drilling. But in a post on the social media platform X after the appointment announcement, the politician echoed Trump when he said at EPA he would strive for U.S. “energy dominance.”
Many industry groups hope the incoming administration will loosen environmental regulations. The American Chemistry Council, which advocates for the chemical industry, is calling for EPA to shed restrictive rules and accelerate approval of new chemicals. The American Petroleum Institute said it hopes the agency will revoke regulations on vehicle emissions and fees on methane emissions from oil and gas production.
The scientific justification for such rules comes from EPA’s Office of Research and Development (ORD), a 1500-person office that analyzes what’s known about chemicals and pollution. During the first Trump administration, political appointees interfered with chemical assessments, such as a toxicity report that had been prepared for a PFAS chemical called perfluorobutane sulfonic acid. Trump appointees changed part of the analysis so the chemical might look less hazardous. In a report released last year, the agency’s inspector general found that the last-minute fight caused “delay, confusion, and significant changes” to the assessment.
That episode has many scientists and environmental advocates fearing “an act two which really escalates the tactics,” says environmental epidemiologist Tom Burke of Johns Hopkins University, who was EPA’s science adviser during the last 2 years of former President Barack Obama’s administration.
The agency’s funding and personnel could also face cuts. During Trump’s first term, the White House proposed slashing EPA’s budget by 30% several years in a row. Congress didn’t go along. But EPA’s funding remained essentially flat, and inflation continued to grind down its purchasing power and capacity. Meanwhile 6% of the research workforce left, according to a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), and a hiring freeze meant no replacements.
The agency’s workforce bounced back under President Joe Biden’s administration, which hired several thousand employees. “The agency is more staffed up and is much more diverse than it used to be,” says Chitra Kumar, managing director of the Climate & Energy Program at UCS and former director in EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights. The revitalized agency issued new standards for lead in drinking water and tightened requirements for vehicle and power plant emissions.
A chapter in a 920-page document called Project 2025 offers the most specific guide to a possible Trump agenda for EPA. During the campaign, Trump denied any connection to the document, which was released last year by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, but its authors have extensive ties to his former administration. The chapter on EPA, written by Mandy Gunasekara, chief of staff at the agency for the last half of the Trump presidency, calls for scaling back agency efforts to address historical inequities that have left communities of color and other groups facing higher exposure to pollution and environmental hazards.
Funding from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act has enabled EPA to offer $2 billion in grants to help underserved communities address pollution. Zeldin and other incoming political appointees at EPA could slow down the spending of these funds, Kumar predicts, with real-world consequences. “It’s the poorest among us, and people in rural regions, who are often more exposed to environmental pollution,” says toxicologist Linda Birnbaum, who led the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences until 2019.
Project 2025 also has a list of priorities for ORD, an office that it calls “precautionary, bloated, unaccountable.” For example, it calls for getting rid of a provision that has allowed EPA to recruit scientists at salaries above the government pay scale for 5-year renewable contracts. Eliminating this “would really cripple EPA’s efforts” in leading-edge areas, such as computational toxicology, says Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta, who retired in 2021 after 4 years as acting head of ORD.
Much larger cuts could come from an executive order to implement an employment category called Schedule F, which would remove civil service protections from many federal jobs and allow political appointees to more easily fire those employees. But an executive order could be slow to take effect, because the Biden administration in April changed regulations to give employees a right to appeal reassignment or layoff.
Burke says there’s a limit to how small ORD can get and still fulfill the tasks required by the Clean Air Act and other laws. “I can’t imagine, unless we have major revision of the statutes, that there could be massive elimination of the scientific core.”
Large budget cuts or plummeting morale could still shrink the science office. Russell Vought, who headed the White House Office of Management and Budget during Trump’s first term, said of EPA employees during a 2023 speech: “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”
Chris Frey, an environmental engineer at North Carolina State University who spent the past 2 years as the head of ORD, bristles at that. “They deserve to be respected, not vilified.”
