EPA shutters research arm, slashes thousands of jobs in massive restructuring
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin defended the shake-up, saying it would position the agency to better deliver on its mission while contributing to what he called 'the Great American Comeback.''This reduction in force will ensure we can better fulfill that mission while being responsible stewards of your hard-earned tax dollars,' Zeldin said.But critics argue the EPA is gutting the very scientific backbone that enables it to assess and respond to threats to public health and the environment.'The research and development office is the heart and brain of the EPA,' said Justin Chen, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Council 238, which represents EPA workers. 'Without it, we don't have the means to assess impacts upon human health and the environment. Its destruction will devastate public health in our country.'The research office — EPA's main scientific body — currently supports 1,540 positions across 10 national facilities, from Florida and North Carolina to Oregon. Up to 1,155 scientists, including chemists, biologists, and toxicologists, are expected to be laid off.Despite assurances from EPA that 'all laboratory functions' will continue under the new structure, critics remain unconvinced.The announcement follows the administrative suspension of 139 EPA employees who signed a 'declaration of dissent' challenging the Trump administration's environmental policies. The agency accused them of 'unlawfully undermining' the president's agenda, a rare and public internal revolt.In their June 30 letter, dissenting employees wrote: 'The EPA is no longer living up to its mission to protect human health and the environment.'Meanwhile, the agency is also offering a third round of deferred resignations to eligible employees, including those within the research division. The application period for voluntary departures remains open through July 25, spokeswoman Molly Vaseliou confirmed.- EndsWith inputs from Associated Press
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Time of India
2 hours ago
- Time of India
Trump's EPA to roll back cornerstone of climate action
Trump's EPA to roll back cornerstone of climate action The administration of US president Donald Trump is forging ahead with a plan to revoke a scientific finding that's long been the cornerstone of US climate action. Lee Zeldin, the head of the Environmental protection agency (EPA) who along with Trump has called for the "death of the Green New Scam," unveiled the move at a car dealership in the US state of Indiana on Tuesday, hailing it as "the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States. " At the heart of the rollback is the Obama-era 2009 endangerment finding, grounded in the landmark Supreme Court case Massachusetts v. EPA. That ruling established the EPA has authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases as air pollutants, a legal foundation for US efforts to curb emissions. What's at stake if the endangerment finding is reversed? If the endangerment finding is thrown out, the EPA would lose its ability to use the Clean air Act to regulate greenhouse gases, a move experts warn would represent a "radical pivot in American climate and energy policy." "It represents a complete US step away from renewable energy and energy efficiency in favor of full embrace of expanded production and use of fossil fuels, including coal, oil and natural gas," Barry Rabe, environmental and public policy professor at the University of Michigan, told DW. The second Trump administration is acting more aggressively in just about everything than the first, said Michael Gerrard, professor at Columbia Law School. It's closely following the blueprint of Project 2025, a road map developed by conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation. The 900-page document suggested an "update" of the endangerment finding. The finding is the basis for rules regulating climate pollution established under the Obama and Biden administrations. Rules on power plants, vehicles, airplanes and landfills could now be repealed, said Jason Rylander, legal director of the Center for Biological Diversity's Climate Law Institute. At the same time, climate change continues to intensify across the US, fueling extreme heat, wildfires, floods and billion-dollar weather disasters. "Climate change isn't going away. We are rapidly accelerating past 1.5 degrees. There will be additional public health and environmental harms that will result from that," said Rylander. What will happen next? The EPA has formally drawn up a proposal, which is now open for public comment until September. The agency will then review and respond to the feedback before issuing a final ruling, expected by the end of the year. There will then likely be lawsuits. "Groups like mine will certainly sue," said Rylander. The cases will first go to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and could then be appealed to the US Supreme Court. It could take years for the case to reach the Supreme Court. But once the EPA issues its final decision, the endangerment finding will be revoked, Gerrard told DW. "It stays revoked unless a court overturns it." Would the agency's arguments hold up in court? The endangerment finding is based on decades of scientific conclusions from credible global sources about the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on climate change and public health. Rylander said the EPA was "slicing and dicing the statute to try to come up with some sort of loopholes," and that none of the arguments brought forward "really passed the laugh test." Still, with a six-to-three conservative majority, the Supreme Court has repeatedly chipped away at federal climate regulations in recent years. "So, it is possible that the Supreme Court will uphold this," said Gerrard, who is also faculty director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change law. One argument the agency is using to reverse the finding is that its economic and political significance is so great that it requires explicit authorization from Congress. And while the EPA under Obama and Biden assumed it was enough to show that greenhouse gas emissions caused by humans endanger the climate, the Trump administration wants to evaluate each gas individually and by sector. "And they are saying each chunk, like carbon dioxide from US power plants alone, has to endanger the climate," Gerrard said, adding that this is much harder to establish. "So, a court that is hostile to climate regulation might follow that approach and agree with the Trump EPA and say that the endangerment finding is not valid." The EPA proposal also argues the 2009 finding failed to consider the benefits of CO2 emissions alongside their costs. Rylander called this "a fallacious argument," comparing it to deciding whether a species is endangered under the Endangered Species Act. "That's not an economic decision. It's a question of science," he said, adding that it's the same with pollutants, like CO2. "Do they cause public health harm or do they not?" Will climate action continue in the US even if the finding is reversed? Rabe said a reversal would cause "a chilling effect on many existing federal policies for greenhouse gas emissions." Still, the EPA would retain authority to regulate other pollutants such as sulfur dioxide, mercury and coal ash from coal-fired power plants. "And many states are working to address pollution from cars and power plants, and they would do that under state law," said Rylander, adding that "US efforts to decarbonize will still continue." However, Gerrard said, "the best tool they have would be gone."
NDTV
19 hours ago
- NDTV
Projections Of Future Global Warming Exaggerated: Trump-Vetted Scientists
A new report from the US Department of Energy says projections of future global warming are exaggerated, while benefits from higher levels of carbon dioxide such as more productive farms are overlooked. It concludes, at odds with the scientific mainstream, that policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions risk doing more harm than good. Released Tuesday, the report is part of an effort by the Trump administration to try to end the US government's authority to regulate greenhouse gases. It's the output of scientists known for contradicting the consensus embodied in volumes of research by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose work is approved by virtually every nation. Publishing an alternate approach to the science of global warming on the same day that the Environmental Protection Agency said it plans to revoke the endangerment finding - a determination that greenhouse gases harm public health and welfare - marks a step up in the administration's war on regulations. Since its adoption in 2009, the endangerment finding has become the bedrock of many US environmental rules. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said repealing the finding would "end $1 trillion or more in hidden taxes on American businesses and families." Climate experts say it will hobble the country's efforts to rein in rising temperatures and lessen the impacts, such as more intense storms, droughts and wildfires. The federal government's own research shows climate-fueled extreme weather is already causing $150 billion in losses a year in the US. In its proposed rule to nix the finding, the EPA references the Energy Department's report more than two dozen times. Energy Secretary Chris Wright wrote in the report's foreword that he had commissioned it and selected the authors to form a working group. The agency's support for the contrarian research stands in contrast to the broad rollback of other climate work under President Donald Trump. Since his inauguration in January, hundreds of scientists have been dismissed from agencies, including some who had focused on climate change. The EPA recently moved to shutter its main scientific research arm, which has been a crucial tool for policymaking. The US canceled a landmark climate change report, the sixth National Climate Assessment, and has taken down numerous webpages on climate science. Some of those were related to previous National Climate Assessments - studies that hundreds of researchers spent years painstakingly compiling. The new report's authors include Steven Koonin, a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution who wrote a 2021 booking arguing that climate science is "unsettled"; Roy Spencer, a University of Alabama in Huntsville scientist and senior fellow at the climate-denying group Cornwall Alliance; and Judith Curry, a climatologist formerly of Georgia Tech who testified to a Senate committee in 2023 that climate change has been mischaracterized as a crisis. An Energy Department spokesperson said the report's authors "represent diverse viewpoints and political backgrounds and are all well-respected and highly credentialed individuals." The spokesperson added that the report "was reviewed internally by a group of DOE scientific researchers and policy experts from the Office of Science and National Labs," and that there will be a 30-day comment period for the public to weigh in. Ann Carlson, an environmental law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, said the report presents a series of arguments the administration can draw on to contend "public health and welfare is not endangered by emissions that come from the auto sector, from the trucking sector, from the electricity sector." Rather than denying climate change is occurring, Carlson said, "What they're trying to say instead is, 'Well, it's not so bad. It's really expensive to mitigate. And that expense actually harms people more than anything we could do" to slow it down. That's in keeping with past comments by members of Trump's cabinet that have downplayed global warming or public concern about it. Carlson said the report is "a wholesale assault" on climate science and previous policy. Zeke Hausfather, the climate lead at Stripe Inc. and a research scientist at nonprofit Berkeley Earth, has contributed to major US and international climate reports. He described the Energy Department publication as "scattershot" and said it "would not pass muster in any traditional scientific peer review process." That the administration released it after taking down webpages hosting "the actual, congressionally mandated National Climate Assessments," he said, is "a farce." The report is a "package of punches" against the scientific consensus that previously grounded US climate policy, and against that policy itself, said Jennifer Jacquet, a professor of environmental science and policy at the University of Miami. "It's really surreal to think that's where we are in 2025." The EPA will have to go through the lengthy federal rulemaking process to try to abolish the endangerment finding. If the proposed rule is finalized, legal challenges are inevitable. The issue could end up before the Supreme Court, which ruled in 2007's Massachusetts v. EPA that greenhouse gases were pollutants the EPA could regulate under the Clean Air Act. Getting the court, which now has a conservative supermajority, to overturn the 2007 decision may be the endgame, said Carlson. The effort would be risky but could succeed, she said. "I think on every front, the arguments that the [EPA] administrator is going to make - based on the DOE report - are extremely weak," said Carlson. "But we also have a court that's very hostile to environmental regulation."
Time of India
2 days ago
- Time of India
Trump's EPA targets key health ruling underpinning all US greenhouse gas rules
Washington: The Trump administration said on Tuesday it will rescind the long-standing finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health, removing the legal foundation for all U.S. greenhouse gas regulations. If finalized, the repeal would end current limits on greenhouse gas pollution from vehicle tailpipes, power plants, smokestacks and other sources, and hamper future U.S. efforts to combat global warming. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the agency's plan to rescind the "endangerment finding" at an event at a car dealership in Indiana, alongside Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and called it the largest deregulatory action in U.S. history. The proposal, which needs to undergo a public comment period, would cut $54 billion in costs annually through the repeal of all greenhouse gas standards, including the vehicle tailpipe standard, he said. Under President Joe Biden, the EPA said the tailpipe rules through 2032 would avoid more than 7 billion tons of carbon emissions as it prodded automakers to build more EVs and provide nearly $100 billion of annual net benefits to society including $62 billion in reduced fuel costs, and maintenance and repair costs for drivers. Environmental groups blasted the move, saying it spells the end of the road for U.S. action against climate change, even as the impacts of global warming become more severe. "With today's announcement, the EPA is telling us in no uncertain terms that U.S. efforts to address climate change are over. For the industries that contribute most to climate change, the message is 'pollute more.' For everyone feeling the pain of climate disasters, the message is 'you're on our own,'" said Abigail Dillen, president of Earthjustice. The move is expected to trigger legal challenges, according to several environmental groups, states and lawyers. Zeldin said a 2024 Supreme Court decision that reduced the power of federal agencies to interpret the laws they administer, known as the Chevron deference, means that the EPA does not have the ability to regulate greenhouse gases. "We do not have that power on our own to decide as an agency that we are going to combat global climate change because we give ourselves that power," Zeldin said. He added that if Congress decides it wants to amend the federal Clean Air Act to explicitly state the U.S. should regulate carbon dioxide, methane and other planet-warming gases, the EPA would follow its lead. SHAKING THE FOUNDATION The endangerment finding's roots date back to 2009, when the EPA under former Democratic President Barack Obama issued a finding that emissions from new motor vehicles contribute to pollution and endanger public health and welfare. That assessment followed a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision in its landmark Massachusetts v. EPA case that said the EPA has the authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and required the agency to make a scientific finding on whether those emissions endanger public health. The endangerment finding was upheld in several legal challenges and underpinned subsequent greenhouse gas regulations, ranging from tailpipe standards for vehicles, carbon dioxide standards for aircraft, and methane standards for oil and gas operations. Zeldin and Wright challenged the global scientific consensus on climate change that global warming and its impacts have since been unfolding faster than expected and that policymakers need to step up action to curb global greenhouse gas emissions. They also contradict the advisory opinion issued last week by the International Court of Justice, which said failure by governments to reduce emissions could be an internationally wrongful act, and found that treaties such as the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change should be considered legally binding. The administration has already dismissed all authors of the U.S. National Climate Assessment, which detailed climate change impacts across the country. "Now the public is open to engage in a thoughtful dialogue about what is climate change? It is a real physical phenomenon. It's worthy of study. It's worthy of even some action, but what we have done instead is nothing related to the actual science of climate change or pragmatic ways to make progress," Wright said. Zeldin said on a podcast earlier Tuesday that the endangerment finding never acknowledged "any benefit or need for carbon dioxide." Industry reaction was limited on Tuesday, with some trade groups weighing in and some companies remaining quiet. American Trucking Associations welcomed the announcement, saying that Biden-era vehicle emissions standards "put the trucking industry on a path to economic ruin and would have crippled our supply chain," said its president, Chris Spear. Ford said in a statement that Biden-created tailpipe standards did "not align with the market," and America needs "a single, stable standard to foster business planning." "The standard should align with science and customer choice, reduce carbon emissions by getting more stringent over time, and grow American manufacturing," Ford said. Other automakers Toyota, GM, Stellantis declined to comment. Marty Durbin, president of the Global Energy Institute at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said it welcomed the administration's focus on affordable energy but said it is still weighing the proposal. "While we did not call for this proposal, we are reviewing it and will consult with members so we can provide constructive feedback to the agency," he said.
