Implications of Trump’s Second Term at EPA: Staff Exodus and Environmental Consequences

President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration is just weeks away, and many of the staff at the Environmental Protection Agency are eyeing the exits rather than trying to hunker down to withstand the coming onslaught.

Many of the agency’s 16,000 staffers served through the first Trump administration, a period that left them feeling ignored, mistrusted and abused by political leadership. Now, ahead of a second term that Trump and his advisers have said will be more aggressive in targeting the “deep state,” many EPA employees are considering whether now is the time to leave.

The Risk of Staff Exodus and Its Impact

Any significant exodus of staff, either through retirement, resignation or termination, could devastate key EPA functions. While the agency’s work on issues like climate change are political lightning rods, the bulk of its day-to-day activities are devoted to issues with widespread bipartisan support, such as ensuring that air is safe to breathe and water is safe to drink, cleaning up contaminated land and responding to disasters like train derailments and oil spills.

But that work requires significant scientific and institutional know-how — which could be compromised if the agency loses large numbers of employees.

Staffers “are calling me day and night,” said Matthew Tejada, who spent a decade leading environmental justice work at EPA before taking the helm of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s environmental health program in 2023. “I think that the EPA, in 12 to 24 months, is a shadow of the agency that we know.”

Policy Changes Under Trump’s Administration

Trump’s pick to head the agency, former Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.), hasn’t spoken publicly in depth about his plans for agency staffing or funding. In an interview with Fox News shortly after Trump announced his selection, Zeldin spoke of “unleashing economic prosperity through the EPA” and “advancing America-first policies,” while adding that Trump “cares about conserving the environment.”

“The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail. He will deliver,” transition spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.

Trump and his supporters have indicated they will launch an aggressive offense against the so-called deep state, the civil-service bureaucrats they felt were holding them back in his first term.

Trump has tapped Russell Vought to return to the White House Office of Management and Budget, a position he held in Trump’s first term. Vought has said that he wants to slash funding for EPA so the agency “can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry.”

Vought, the prominent coauthor of the Project 2025 blueprint, was recorded during a training session talking about his plans for EPA workers and other federal employees: “We want to put them in trauma.” The recording was obtained and published by ProPublica.

Challenges Ahead for EPA

Several maneuvers the Trump administration made during its first term to attempt to shrink or hobble the federal workforce are expected to be reprised more effectively this time. That includes potentially designating staffers involved in policymaking as “Schedule F,” effectively making them at-will employees, and seeking to move the agency headquarters out of Washington.

“I think the staff at EPA are in a state of shock. Not because there’s an effort to downsize EPA, but because there’s an effort to smash EPA and to politicize the civil service in a way we’ve never seen before,” said Tim Whitehouse, a former EPA enforcement attorney who now leads the nonprofit group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

It’s not yet clear how large of an exodus the agency may see. For many staffers, finding another job won’t necessarily be easy, especially for those with technical expertise or legal conflicts that could limit their ability to immediately start litigating against their former employer.

Environmental groups are gearing up to battle the incoming Trump administration. Earthjustice’s careers page was deluged with visitors the day after the election, and the group opted to build a new tool to allow interested people to submit information about themselves even if there’s not an opening, said Sam Sankar, the group’s senior vice president for programs. But the environmental community can create only so many jobs.

About 20 percent of EPA’s permanent workforce is eligible to retire, and another 13 percent will become eligible within five years, according to agency spokesperson Remmington Belford. Those numbers raise the risk of “brain drain” if people with experience and expertise in complex environmental issues suddenly depart.

Belford couldn’t say whether the agency has seen an increase in retirements since the election, but Nicole Cantello, president of AFGE Local 704, which represents around a thousand workers in EPA’s Chicago-based Midwest office, said she has noticed an uptick in sudden retirement announcements among senior leaders in her region since the election.

Retirements are usually planned months in advance to ensure smooth transitions, but these people are leaving within weeks of their announcements, though none has openly pinned the decision on the election, she said.

Cantello blamed the sudden interest in workers leaving EPA on what she described as micromanagement during the first Trump administration that left workers feeling ignored and stymied from helping the public.

For instance, Cantello recalled one incident in which air monitors around a community were giving a “concerning result.” In any other administration, she said, the agency would have quickly reported those findings.

Instead, under Trump “we had to have a very long discussion about whether or not we were going to put that result up on the website,” she said. “That’s something I’ve never experienced before, you know, just the idea that you would pause before you would inform the community.”

Cathy Stepp, who worked as Trump’s Midwest regional administrator, defended her approach as necessary to making informed decisions.

“When I needed more details on an issue it was to CLEAR unnecessary delays and logjams,” Stepp, who is now the city manager for Branson, Missouri, wrote in an email. “The overwhelmingly majority of our staff appreciated my taking the time to fully understand all sides of an issue, instead of making knee-jerk, uninformed decisions.”

An exodus of expertise could have significant consequences in EPA’s science and research divisions, whose work triggered heated battles during the first Trump administration, when former chemicals industry officials were installed in key scientific posts. During that time, EPA faced a series of allegations concerning scientific interference, particularly around research concerning toxic chemicals such as PFAS and formaldehyde.

EPA’s Office of Research and Development has shrunk from a onetime high of 1,900 staffers to about 1,500 personnel, and any further reductions threaten to hobble EPA’s capacity to provide critical knowledge, said Chris Frey, former assistant administrator for the research office.

“If there would be attrition of ORD scientific staff, even just a few people leaving, it could significantly degrade ORD’s capability in a given scientific area,” said Frey, who left EPA in September to return to North Carolina State University.

EPA has complex scientific processes in place for programs such as the Integrated Risk Information System, which studies the dangers from toxic chemicals, and the National Ambient Air Quality Standards, which require synthesizing and analyzing vast amounts of scientific research. Research from those programs forms the basis for some of the agency’s most significant regulations and has frequently been challenged by industry and their Republican allies.

And if staff are heading for the exits, it might not take any act of Congress or the new administration to hobble them, said one outside scientific expert who advises EPA.

“I think sort of hollowing out the expertise is a concern,” said one advisory board member granted anonymity to speak freely.

State environmental agencies that are anticipating a shrunken Washington workforce are preparing to try to pick up the slack. And they are starting to make the case for why more federal dollars should flow their way to do so.

EPA has granted most states permitting authority to run key federal programs governing water and air pollution, and they get federal funding to help cover the cost. But congressional funding for State and Tribal Assistance Grants has been basically level in recent years. Since it makes up the largest line-item in EPA’s budget, that funding is a frequent target in GOP proposals to slash the agency’s budget.

“The states are very concerned about the funding to hire the workforce and to run the delegated programs — the basics of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act,” said Ben Grumbles, executive director of the Environmental Council of the States. “It’s going to be an increasing concern if the federal agencies like EPA are dramatically downsized and Congress is not providing the resources.”

Meanwhile, green groups are laying the groundwork to deal with potential major changes at EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance. The office has long been a target for Republican administrations, and even got split up by Ronald Reagan’s first EPA administrator in 1981, although it was reconstituted under the Clinton administration.

Rumors abounded during the first Trump administration that political leaders would seek to make a similar move to dissolve the centralized office and redistribute enforcement personnel, although they never materialized.

Eric Schaeffer, who ran EPA’s Office of Civil Enforcement before founding the watchdog group Environmental Integrity Project, blasted Trump allies who want EPA to ease up enforcement or stop entirely.

“I think they have a very primitive kind of ‘ticket writing’ concept of enforcement,” Schaeffer said. He recalled once hearing a state official describe enforcement as being like a police officer on a motorcycle, flagging down speeding motorists.

But police carry out significantly more complex investigations than mere traffic citations, Schaeffer said — and so does EPA. “You need people who are really sharp, who know how to monitor and know how to do the forensics and understand how to apply leverage to get the people responsible to clean up.”

Outside groups are watching to see if the second Trump administration seeks to reorganize the office this time. But they’re also anticipating another possibility: that regardless of where enforcement staff might sit, their investigatory powers could get pointed not at polluters, but rather at the organizations that have received funding from the Biden administration through Inflation Reduction Act programs.

Sankar, with Earthjustice, said green groups are already thinking through how they can support organizations that might get deluged with document demands and other investigatory requests.

“The Trump administration, one of its stated priorities is to eliminate support for a clean energy transition and therefore we fully expect that they will be looking for ways to interfere with funding and activities by companies and groups trying to do that work, and we are preparing to help support them,” he said.