EPA Would Shrink to 1970 Staffing Levels—‘When the Skies Were Dark With Smog’—Under Proposed Plan

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency would slash 65 percent of its workforce under plans that its administrator, Lee Zeldin, has discussed with the White House, President Donald Trump said Wednesday at his first cabinet meeting.

Such a severe cutback would leave EPA with a staffing level on par with its workforce in its first year of existence, 1970, when it was responsible for only a fraction of the laws it now implements and enforces on clean water, air and land. Based on budget figures on the agency’s website, a 65 percent cut would bring the agency’s 15,130-person workforce down to about 5,300 full-time employees.

“I spoke with Lee Zeldin, and he thinks he’s going to be cutting 65 or so percent of the people from environmental,” Trump said at the cabinet meeting where he laid out plans for massive layoffs across the federal government. “And we’re going to speed up the process, too, at the same time,” he said, apparently referring to a plan for quicker decision-making at EPA.

“You had a lot of people that weren’t doing their job,” Trump said. “They were just obstructionists and a lot of people that didn’t exist, I guess.” Turning to Zeldin, the former New York congressman who took over as agency administrator less than a month ago, he said, “Lee … you found a lot of empty spots that the people weren’t there. They didn’t exist.”

Hours after the cabinet meeting, a White House official said the president was referring to spending cuts, not personnel cuts. Such cuts would reduce the $9 billion EPA budget to about $3.2 billion—a level that in inflation-adjusted terms would be less than at any time in the agency’s 55-year history. 

“President Trump, DOGE, and Administrator Zeldin are committed to cutting waste, fraud, and abuse across all agencies,” said Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesman, referring to the budget-cutting Department of Government Efficiency effort by billionaire donor Elon Musk. “After recently identifying $20 billion fraudulent in spending, Administrator Zeldin is committed to eliminating 65% of the EPA’s wasteful spending.”

Zeldin has maintained that EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund is fraudulent spending, a contention hotly disputed by those who created and have managed its funding of clean energy programs in disadvantaged communities.

A bipartisan trio of former EPA administrators who served under the two Bush administrations and the Obama administration raised alarms about the Trump administration’s plans for the agency in an opinion piece Thursday in The New York Times.

“We fear that such cuts would render the agency incapable of protecting Americans from grave threats in our air, water and land,” wrote William Reilly, Christine Todd Whitman and Gina McCarthy. “While there are opportunities to make the agency more efficient and better at enforcing laws, Americans across every state, city and local community would suffer the effects of deep staff cuts.”

Former EPA staff expressed outrage at the proposed downsizing, which they argue would leave an already understaffed agency ill-equipped to address environmental challenges that are increasing at a time of climate change and threaten health, lives and property. Although the agency loses personnel regularly due to retirements and attrition, the ex-staffers say any suggestion that EPA has a ghost employee problem is a gross mischaracterization.

“Trump’s dangerous plans to fire thousands of EPA scientists and other public servants takes a wrecking ball to EPA, throwing the doors wide open for corporate polluters to freely dump toxic chemicals in the air we breathe and the water we all drink,” said Michelle Roos, executive director of the Environmental Protection Network, a group of former agency employees.

“A 65 percent cut would gut the agency and bring EPA to the lowest level of staffing since EPA was created in 1970, when the skies were dark with smog, toxic rivers caught fire and pollution was a leading cause of premature death,” Roos said.

The proposed plan would go far beyond the 8 percent cutback in workforce that EPA saw soon after the first Trump administration began in 2017. Back then, Trump floated the idea of cutting EPA by one-quarter, but Congress never agreed to such dramatic cutbacks.

With congressional Republicans, who control both chambers, showing little inclination to split with the president on policy, large cutbacks might have a greater chance of succeeding in the second Trump administration. Nevertheless, Republicans have a historically narrow majority in the House, and Senate rules still require 60 affirmative votes on most substantive issues, so lawmakers usually have to arrive at a bipartisan compromise on their must-pass budget bills. Despite pressure from conservatives for deep cuts, Congress has generally kept funding levels at the status quo through continuing budget resolutions.

The agency is already reeling from the Trump administration’s efforts to reverse President Joe Biden’s climate policies and to eliminate any personnel that addressed environmental justice and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. EPA said 168 workers were put on administrative leave earlier this month as part of that effort. Hundreds of other EPA employees were informed they were laid off days later in a government-wide culling of “probationary” employees who had been in their roles for less than a year, a designation that included longtime staff who were recently promoted or moved to new duties.

Trump’s remarks coincided with a memo that went out to all federal agencies from White House budget director Russell Vought, calling for all agencies to submit reorganization plans by March 13. Vought was one of the architects of the conservative policy roadmap known as Project 2025—a document Trump disavowed during his campaign. Now in charge of steering budget policy for the administration, Vought echoed Project 2025’s dim view of the federal government in his memo. He said Trump was given a mandate to reduce the size of government by the voters last November.

With a victory margin of 1.5 percent in the popular vote, one of the narrowest in a presidential race since World War II, Trump is embarking on a historic rollback in the role of the federal government, a project long sought by arch conservatives.

“The federal government is costly, inefficient and deeply in debt,” Vought said in his memo. “At the same time, it is not producing results for the American public. Instead, tax dollars are being siphoned off to fund unproductive and unnecessary programs that benefit radical interest groups while hurting hardworking American citizens.”

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said word of potential deep cuts at EPA flies in the face of Zeldin’s assurances during his confirmation hearing that he planned to work collaboratively with agency staff.

“It is now clear that the fix was in from the very beginning, to help the looters and polluters who bankrolled President Trump’s campaign,” Whitehouse said. “Trumpian hot air from Zeldin and others about protecting clean air and clean water cannot mask the cruel reality that those goals fail if EPA is disabled.”

This story was updated Feb. 27, 2025, with comments from the White House and former EPA administrators.