Enviros say EPA staffing cuts will undermine research, but agency critics say its science was biased

After the Supreme Court approved the Trump administration’s plans to lay off thousands of federal employees, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced “organizational improvements” in the department. These actions would, Zeldin said recently in making the announcement, address inefficiencies and improve the EPA’s ability to fulfill its core mission. 

Zeldin said in the announcement Friday that he was creating a new Office of Finance and Administration to streamline the agency’s financial and administrative operations, as well as changes to other agency programs. The following day, Zeldin announced that the Office of Research and Development (ORD) would be eliminated. 

Altogether, the planned cuts, which include voluntary retirements and separations in addition to layoffs, would reduce staffing by 23%, from a high of 16,155 employees in January to 12,448 employees after the changes are implemented, according to the EPA. 

Politicized science

Critics of the cuts claim that the ORD was doing important research into the impacts of climate change, and by eliminating the department Zeldin was going to make it harder to address the problem. 

Kyla Bennett, director of science policy for the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, was among the most quoted critics. 

Bennett, who worked for the EPA for 10 years, told NPR the cuts were “despicable” and Scripps News that the loss of ORD would lead to “air that’s not healthy to breathe and water that’s not healthy to drink.” She told The Washington Post that “Trump’s EPA clearly doesn’t care about scientific research or protecting human health or the environment.” 

However, supporters of the cuts say the agency had a history of biased science that was crafted to support preferred policies. Steve Milloy, senior legal fellow with the Energy and Environmental Legal Institute and publisher of “JunkScience.com,” was hired by the Department of Energy in 1992 under then-President George H.W. Bush to investigate the EPA’s research. The report he produced argues that federal officials routinely manipulated scientific research to support preferred policies. 

“Virtually everything EPA does with science is just tainted with political decisions,” Milloy told Just the News. 

In 2009, under then-President Barack Obama, EPA officials, emails showed, had a pre-determined conclusion when developing what became known as the “endangerment finding,” which declared greenhouse gases could be regulated because they risked public health. 

It appears that the Biden-Harris administration’s EPA hid comments that would have undermined its Clean Power Plan 2.0 rule (CPP2), which the Trump administration is currently reviewing. The EPA had sought comments from the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Lab (NETL) on the efficacy of carbon capture technology prior to proposing the rule. The comments, which were somehow scrubbed from the administrative record, disputed a key claim the rule is based on. 

Meaningful changes

Milloy said when the EPA was first established in 1970, there wasn’t a lot of research into the environment. As the research was carried out, he said, it led to reasonable science-based policy decisions. 

Over time, however, the science at the agency became more and more politicized, a problem that extended beyond the EPA. After raising concerns about the problem for a few decades now, Milloy said, the decision to close the ORD is somewhat of a vindication for all his efforts. 

“I've been battling the EPA Office of Research and Development all these years. It's been a tough struggle. But 35 years later, I'm still standing, and it's going to be gone,” Milloy said. 

Milloy said to make any meaningful changes, however, Zeldin will need to go beyond staffing cuts. 

The EPA, he said, has amassed a long list of standards and regulations, including the endangerment finding, and the supporting research isn’t reliable. These regulations need to be done away with, or when another Democratic administration is sworn into office, he said, all the Trump administration’s reforms can be undone. 

“This is kind of a unique opportunity to fix this once and for all. So, it's great that ORD is being terminated and scattered, but we've got to figure out a way to make these reforms permanent,” Milloy said.