Employees tasked with overseeing environmental justice initiatives at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency could be placed on immediate administrative leave as soon as today, leaving them in limbo as the Trump administration decides their fates, according to people familiar with ongoing conversations at the agency.
There is a disagreement among members of the Trump administration about whether staffers should be laid off or reassigned, said a former high-level EPA official who spoke anonymously to protect their sources within the agency privy to the ongoing discussions. That official and others interviewed by Inside Climate News were uncertain how many workers were immediately affected, but some said the number was around 100.
At least one other former senior EPA official, who recently resigned from the agency, corroborated the account Wednesday, saying the information about the impending action was being discussed among agency officials and staff.
Approached for comment, an EPA spokesperson offered only one sentence Wednesday: “The Office of Environmental Justice employees have not been placed on administrative leave.”
In a separate statement sent Thursday, an agency spokesperson confirmed to Inside Climate News that 168 staffers were placed on administrative leave. “Career staff made determinations on which Office of Environmental Justice employees had statutory duties or core mission functions. As such, 168 staffers were placed on administrative leave as their function did not relate to the agency’s statutory duties or grant work. EPA is in the process of evaluating new structure and organization to ensure we are meeting our mission of protecting human health and the environment for all Americans,” the spokesperson said.
The Wall Street Journal first reported news of the administrative leave orders late Wednesday. “Administrative leave,” or leave with pay and without penalty, is governed by law and federal regulations that were just updated by the Biden administration in December. Those rules say an agency may place an employee on administrative leave for no more than 10 workdays in any calendar year. Agencies are required to track and report the purpose of the administrative leave according to several defined categories, including employee conduct and safety or weather. The rules stress the use of administrative leave should be limited.
Since the inauguration, the Trump administration has focused intently on the EPA, notifying more than 1,100 employees—many hired during the Biden administration to lead climate and pollution programs—that they could be fired immediately.
The warnings take aim at recent hires on probation and experienced staff reassigned to environmental justice-related work, which include issues such as lead pipe replacement, hazardous waste cleanup and clean energy projects. An internal email sent on Feb. 3 bluntly said: “As a probation/trial employee, the agency has the right to immediately terminate you.”
The moves have nearly paralyzed the agency’s ability to function, as employees cope with the prospect of being fired without much notice.
Meg McCollister, who recently resigned as the EPA’s administrator for Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska, attended the swearing-in ceremony for the incoming regional administrator on Feb. 4.
She said the mood at the event was hardly celebratory. “Everyone I hugged whispered the same thing: ‘Oh my gosh, it’s horrible.’ Or, ‘Please help us.’ Some were fighting back tears because they just didn’t know what to do,” she said. “They wake up every day, and it’s worse than the day before.”
McCollister said that one of the projects close to her heart was tackling lead contamination in Missouri, where active lead mining compromised soil and water quality. “Children under six are the most vulnerable to lead exposure, and it’s happening in their backyards,” she said. “These are the folks who need us the most, and they’re being left behind.”
Now, with the changes the new administration is proposing, McCollister and her former colleagues reflected on what was being lost—projects aimed at helping improve Americans’ health and people with expertise to do it.
President Donald Trump and right-wing leaders have targeted environmental justice as part of a broader attack on efforts to address racial equity. Environmental justice programs aim to reduce pollution and health disparities, benefiting not only communities of color but also low-income, predominantly white communities.
The moves at EPA are taking place alongside similar upheaval at other federal agencies, especially around employees who are focused on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives that aim to ensure workplace decisions are made with representation of minorities in mind. Many of those efforts are being initiated by the team that Trump has tasked with cutting back the federal workforce: the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, led by billionaire donor Elon Musk. ABC News first reported that Musk’s team had gained access to the information technology systems at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration with an eye to looking for information about diversity, equity and inclusion programs and making personnel changes.
Mustafa Ali, the executive vice president for the National Wildlife Federation and who served under President Barack Obama as the EPA’s assistant associate administrator, said that the Trump administration continues to conflate DEI with environmental justice, “which are two different things.” Environmental justice has been in place as a policy since the Clinton administration and was expanded from a program to an office by the Biden administration.
Adam Ortiz, who oversaw environmental justice initiatives as administrator of the Mid-Atlantic region, sees such cuts as a betrayal—especially to the rural, predominantly white communities that had overwhelmingly supported Trump. “More than half of our investments went to these communities,” he said. “In many cases, it was the first significant investment they’d seen since the New Deal. The tragic irony is, the programs and people the president is looking to cut were exactly the ones that invested in these places.”
Ortiz had worked to clean up the Chesapeake Bay and fund water treatment plants in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. “We’re talking about infrastructure projects that are finally upgrading water systems, helping farmers reduce pollution and making these places healthier and more prosperous. And now it’s all being yanked away.”
David Cash felt similarly. Having led the EPA’s environmental efforts in New England since late 2021, he said that every EPA dollar that went into cleaning up brownfields brought in $5 to $10 of private sector, municipal or state investments. Now that he’s left the agency, he said he sees a lot of projects going sideways.
“We know from the announcements about funding freezes that there are grants that were in the process in municipalities all over New England that have had to stop,” he said. “Potential furloughs and firings are going on where companies and community groups were expecting federal funding.”
Cash said he helped introduce hundreds of electric school buses in New England, ensuring children no longer inhaled diesel fumes while waiting at bus stops. “Each of those school buses means a parent doesn’t worry when their kid is standing on the street corner, waiting for the bus, that they’re going to have an [asthma] attack,” he said. “Each of those buses means a driver that is no longer sitting for hours a day in a school bus that has diesel fumes in it.”
None of the former EPA officials were naive to political transitions, but they said what was happening now is different. “It’s not uncommon to shift priorities or change the vocabulary,” Ortiz said. “But wholesale firings of career staff who have dedicated their lives to this work? That’s unprecedented. It’s baffling—not just because of the progress we’ve made, but because it pulls the rug out from under the very people who supported this administration.”
Cash said it filled him with sadness seeing the opportunities that could be lost. “I felt despondent that there were going to be families all over this country that were going to have to worry about what came out of their tap, worry about their kids breathing in polluted air. People who were going to be getting jobs in this growing clean energy sector. And that the United States was going to cede this incredible economic opportunity to China, India and Europe.”
Cash, McCollister and Ortiz all made the point that environmental policy isn’t just about fighting climate change or enforcing regulations. It’s about people, about making their daily lives healthier and their communities better.
“The everyday work of the EPA is nonpartisan,” Ortiz said. “It’s about making sure that everyone—regardless of race or how much money they have—can live in a healthy community. What’s being proposed isn’t just an attack on the agency. It’s an attack on the fundamental principle that we look out for each other.”
McCollister agreed. “People are scared. And they should be. But they’re also resilient. And that gives me hope.”
Inside Climate News’ Marianne Lavelle and Kristoffer Tigue contributed reporting.
This story has been updated with confirmation from EPA that staffers had been put on administrative leave.
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Aman Azhar
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Aman Azhar is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist who covers environmental justice for Inside Climate News with focus on Baltimore-Maryland area. He has previously worked as a broadcast journalist and multimedia producer for the BBC World Service, VOA News and other international news organizations, reporting from London, Islamabad, the United Arab Emirates and New York. He holds a graduate degree in Anthropology of Media from University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and an MA in Political Science from the University of the Punjab, and is the recipient of the Chevening scholarship from the UK government and an academic scholarship for graduate studies from the Australian government.
