Cuts and freezes are jamming up some of the basic functions of government at agencies targeted in President Donald Trump’s rollbacks of his predecessors’ energy and environmental policies, more than a dozen federal employees told POLITICO.
Lockdowns of spending and an absence of guidance from political appointees are leaving Environmental Protection Agency scientists unable to publish their research, preventing some Energy Department officials from visiting their department’s laboratories and forcing the cancellation of disaster planning exercises at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said the 13 employees, who were granted anonymity to avoid reprisals. They said the chaos has also left recipients of Biden-era energy grants in limbo as they wait for approval to continue the projects they’ve started.
Climate Research and Government Impact
“We are set up for failure,” one FEMA official said.
Other affected agencies include the Interior Department and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which conducts crucial climate research and oversees the National Weather Service.
Rather than save taxpayers money, as Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency has promised, federal workers at those five agencies said taxpayers are getting far less return from the government because work has been significantly curbed.
Agency Overhauls and Consequences
A senior White House official defended the strategy and said the Trump administration’s focus is on shrinking the federal deficit. The official said agencies can fulfill core responsibilities at current staffing levels but lamented that legal challenges by Trump’s critics have delayed his plans to slim and reorganize agencies.
“Unfortunately, several activist district court judges have sought to seize control of the management of government agencies,” the official said in a statement. “Delays and disruption caused by litigation are unfortunate, but they will not deter the president from delivering what the voters elected him to do — building a government that is leaner, more effective, and fully aligned with constitutional principles.”
More than 1,300 employees at EPA took the Trump administration’s deferred resignation offer to leave the agency, accounting for about 8 percent of the workforce. More than 1,000 employees were fired or took buyouts at NOAA, cutting its staffing by 10 percent. At DOE, more than 3,500 people departed through the deferred resignation route. Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation has lost a quarter of its staff, while at least 1,000 people at the department’s Bureau of Land Management took the deferred resignation offer or early retirement.
Impact on Research and Operations
At EPA, Administrator Lee Zeldin’s attempted overhaul includes cutting hundreds of employees from the agency’s Office of Research and Development and Office of Air and Radiation, both of which are cornerstones of its public health and climate work. The agency also has said that a mass firing, known as a reduction in force, is coming this summer, which could affect thousands of employees across the country. Many of those people are on the front lines in measuring and monitoring pollution that the agency was designed to regulate.
Scientific research at EPA has cratered, one agency official said. That includes work from sites like the EPA research center in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, that carried out critical air pollution studies.
On top of that, budget cuts forced the National Institutes of Health to stop taking new submissions for its Environmental Health Perspectives journal, removing an avenue for federal scientists to publish peer-reviewed research for free. EPA staff are operating under what they said amounts to a de facto freeze on spending, as they must seek approval for any expenses exceeding $1 through a laborious process that has slowed basic functions.
Challenges and Consequences
That means scientists have been unable to spend the thousands of dollars it costs to submit to other journals or hire contractors to run peer reviews through EPA, the official said. Even purchases for computer software needed to analyze data for scientific research have been paused.
The standstill could even thwart parts of Trump’s own deregulatory agenda, the EPA official said. That’s because the agency is not doing the necessary science to back up its actions to remove and revise regulations — such as EPA’s proposal last week to repeal limits on power plants’ greenhouse gases and weaken standards for their toxic air pollution. That may leave the agency in a weakened position in eventual court battles.
“Without science, the agency can’t function. And that’s what we’re seeing right now,” the official said.
Travel spending limits have also prevented DOE officials from visiting national laboratories and conferences to meet with governments, businesses and professional organizations, one department official said. Travel at Interior and EPA has also largely ceased, agency officials said.
“It’s beyond stultifying,” the EPA official said. “We can’t function.”
EPA and DOE both disputed some of the employees’ accounts, saying in separate statements that the agencies have not frozen spending over $1 or imposed any hold on travel. However, they did acknowledge imposing approval processes for such expenses, saying this effort to control spending would improve stewardship of taxpayer dollars.
Two officials at the Energy Department told POLITICO that restrictions have had the effect of freezing approvals for dozens of energy projects funded by the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, Democrats’ 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and annual appropriations greenlit by Congress. Among other things, they said, that means companies developing taxpayer-backed projects have been stymied from bringing more electricity online — despite Trump’s stated goal of expanding the U.S. power supply.
Challenges in Project Approvals
Many of the projects span multiple budget periods: When developers hit the end of one period, which generally occurs annually, they must request a continuation into the next period or a no-cost extension. Work stops until one of those two things happen — but DOE officials do not have permission to approve those requests, the two department officials and two grant recipients said.
“Every week, more and more projects hit the end of their approved performance period and are waiting for us to act on their request to continue to the next budget period or extend the current one,” one of the officials said. “And we aren’t allowed to.”
That’s left companies like OTS R&D in an impossible spot. CEO Cara Martin said the Energy Department has not assured her that it will cover invoices for the second year of the company’s $1.2 million grant to improve vapor compressors used in electric heat pumps. So work on the project has stopped at the small business in Beltsville, Maryland.
Martin said she may be forced to lay off staff, shore up other financing, dig into the company’s reserves or simply hope the DOE funding eventually comes through.
“We are completely in a holding pattern,” Martin said. “We’ve been told we can choose to continue work, but it will be entirely at our own risk.”
Impact on Disaster Planning and Response
At FEMA, the regular ad hoc exercises known as “thunderbolt” that help smooth snags in emergency response scenarios have been canceled, according to two officials. They said the trainings are essential to preparing for hurricane season, which began June 1.
FEMA has also scrapped the disaster survivor assistance teams that provide information to people in stricken areas, making it unclear how responders will communicate in the field, one of the officials said. In addition, the official said FEMA vendors have not been paid since January and that some have stopped work.
A FEMA spokesperson insisted that disaster response “will continue to be managed without interruption” and blasted what the person described as a “bloated, D.C.-centric dead weight” agency.
“The old processes are being replaced because they failed Americans in real emergencies for decades,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
More fundamentally, the erosion of trust between political and career staff has stanched the flow of day-to-day decision-making and policy, according to officials across several agencies.
Trust Issues and Organizational Challenges
Three DOE employees said Trump’s political appointees have refused to delegate work to career staff. One of those DOE staffers said people who specialized in energy sources the administration has disparaged, like carbon capture or hydrogen power, are aimless.
“It’s more of a culture of fear. Like ‘of course don’t ask that question because you already know the answer,’” that DOE official said. “The politicals are also super sequestered. They live in their own bubble and do their own thing. ”
Following the buyouts and early retirements that DOGE pushed during the administration’s early months, employees said some programs simply do not have enough personnel to operate.
Current State and Future Challenges
At NOAA, the National Weather Service is trying to plug 155 vacancies in offices across the country. Some can no longer staff 24-hour operations. The cuts forced NWS to fly fewer weather balloons that measure pressure systems at high altitude, a key component driving forecast accuracy.
NOAA recently began to course correct, gaining approval from the Commerce Department this month to hire new weather service staffers despite a department-wide hiring freeze.
But elsewhere in the government, the administration is still planning for the mass layoffs, firings and agency reorganizations that Trump’s appointees have promised — a process that court battles have suspended indefinitely at many agencies. Several employees said the resulting purgatory has left them incapacitated, leaderless and adrift.
Operational Challenges and Public Impact
At EPA, work has essentially frozen, according to the first agency official and three other staffers. Even basic reporting is running behind schedule, including power plant emissions data covering harmful pollution such as sulfur dioxide, mercury and nitrogen oxide, and climate change-causing carbon dioxide. That data is supposed to be published every quarter, one of the officials said.
Reorganization is also in the works at the Interior Department, where many of the top slots are vacant. The absences have drawn scrutiny from lawmakers, who have openly questioned how the department can advance oil and gas drilling permits and perform other tasks.
The shortages inside Interior came to a head last month over instructions from Stephanie Holmes, Interior’s acting chief human capital officer and a former DOGE official, that staffers should stop performing the duties of vacant jobs and return to their own assignments. The agency’s backlog of work is even visibly evident in Washington, where weeds have overtaken National Park Service-managed land.
Challenges in Coordination and International Engagement
Basic coordination has also suffered. NOAA officials must get approval to participate in international dialogue, according to three officials familiar with internal processes. That resulted in NOAA scientists missing part of a March meeting for the Group on Earth Observations, which the agency co-chairs, and has stifled engagement with other nations that rely on the agency’s forecasts and models for storms and fisheries.
