About 89 p.c of the Environmental Safety Company’s (EPA’s) workforce was slated to be furloughed as the federal government shuts down, in response to contingency plans that had been posted on-line this week.
In response to the plan, simply 1,734 of the EPA’s 15,166 staff are slated to proceed working in the course of the shutdown, which started Wednesday.
The plan additionally provides a window into the diploma of staffing losses on the EPA in current months, because the company had 17,080 staff at the beginning of the yr.
In the course of the furlough interval, the company will not perform most civil inspections associated to potential violations of environmental legislation.
It would additionally not conduct most of its analysis or problem new permits or grants. Some hazardous waste cleanup can be halted if there isn’t a imminent risk to human well being and property.
The EPA will nonetheless proceed emergency and catastrophe help, hazardous waste cleanup the place there’s an “imminent risk to human life” and legal investigations.
The Trump administration’s plan is just like the latest contingency plan issued by the Biden administration in September 2024. Below that plan, 1,734 staff out of 16,851 would have been anticipated to proceed working.
Below the Biden-era plan, civil inspections, issuance of recent grants and permits, analysis and a few hazardous waste cleanup additionally would have ceased.
Marc Increase, a former EPA senior coverage adviser in the course of the Biden administration, stated throughout a press name forward of the shutdown that if one happens “nobody will be holding polluters accountable for what they dump into the air we breathe and the water that we drink.”
However Increase additionally stated the Trump administration is making the issue worse.
“Over the past 9 months, the White House and EPA leadership have already been shutting down the agency from within,” he stated. “They’ve clawed back hundreds of community grants, rolled back protections against forever chemicals and pesticides, relaxed enforcement for polluters … and they’ve shuttered key programs like the Environmental Justice Office, the Office of Atmospheric Protection and now, they’re closing down EPA’s scientific backbone, the Office of Research and Development.”
The EPA has stated that its actions are in help of a deregulatory agenda that seeks to spice up the U.S. economic system.
—Up to date at 2:16 p.m. EDT
