Latest news with #OfficeofEnvironmentalJusticeandExternalCivilRights
Yahoo
23-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
EPA fires or reassigns hundreds working on 'environmental justice'
President Donald Trump's administration is firing or reassigning over 450 employees at the Environmental Protection Agency as part of a larger push to eliminate "environmental justice" programs. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the employee moves on Monday, saying 280 staffers were being fired, and 175 others would be reassigned. The cut roles were in the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, the Office of Inclusive Excellence, and EPA regional offices. "EPA is taking the next step to terminate the Biden-Harris Administration's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Environmental Justice arms of the agency," a spokesperson told Axios. Zeldin explained at a Monday press conference that tax dollars put toward environmental justice issues were widely misspent. Mexico Is Poisoning Southern California In A Border Crisis Almost No One Knows About "The problem is that, in the name of environmental justice, a dollar will get secured and not get spent on remediating that environmental issue," he said. Read On The Fox News App The firings come the same week that Zeldin launched talks with Mexico about eliminating sewage contamination that flows over the border from Tijuana to pollute California's coastlines. Mexican Sewage Gushing Into Navy Seal Training Waters Is Us' 'Next Camp Lejeune,' Vets Warn Zeldin visited San Diego to discuss the issue on Tuesday, noting that one of the affected areas is the training grounds for Navy SEALs. "The Americans on our side of the border who have been dealing with this… for decades, are out of patience," Zeldin said Tuesday. "There's no way that we are going to stand before the people of California and ask them to have more patience and just bear with all of us as we go through the next 10 or 20 or 30 years of being stuck in 12 feet of raw sewage and not getting anywhere." Epa Chief Takes On Mexican 'Sewage Crisis' Flowing Into Us Waters Where Navy Seals Train "So we are all out of patience," he continued. "There's a very limited opportunity. We're in good faith, both on the American side and also on the Mexican side, what's being communicated by the new Mexican president is an intense desire to fully resolve this situation." Zeldin said that he met with Mexican officials for about 90 minutes Monday night to discuss the sewage spewing into U.S. waters — and relayed that the Mexican environmental secretary wants to have a "strong collaborative relationship" with the U.S. to end the pollution. "I will be speaking with the chief of staff to the Mexican environmental secretary to ensure that over the course of the coming days, over the course of the next couple weeks, that we are able to put together a specific statement from both countries on a mutual understanding of what Mexico is going to do to help resolve this issue," he said. Fox News' Emma Colton contributed to this article source: EPA fires or reassigns hundreds working on 'environmental justice'
Fox News
23-04-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
EPA fires or reassigns hundreds working on 'environmental justice'
President Donald Trump's administration is firing or reassigning over 450 employees at the Environmental Protection Agency as part of a larger push to eliminate "environmental justice" programs. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the employee moves on Monday, saying 280 staffers were being fired, and 175 others would be reassigned. The cut roles were in the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, the Office of Inclusive Excellence, and EPA regional offices. "EPA is taking the next step to terminate the Biden-Harris Administration's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Environmental Justice arms of the agency," a spokesperson told Axios. Zeldin explained at a Monday press conference that tax dollars put toward environmental justice issues were widely misspent. "The problem is that, in the name of environmental justice, a dollar will get secured and not get spent on remediating that environmental issue," he said. The firings come the same week that Zeldin launched talks with Mexico about eliminating sewage contamination that flows over the border from Tijuana to pollute California's coastlines. Zeldin visited San Diego to discuss the issue on Tuesday, noting that one of the affected areas is the training grounds for Navy SEALs. "The Americans on our side of the border who have been dealing with this… for decades, are out of patience," Zeldin said Tuesday. "There's no way that we are going to stand before the people of California and ask them to have more patience and just bear with all of us as we go through the next 10 or 20 or 30 years of being stuck in 12 feet of raw sewage and not getting anywhere." "So we are all out of patience," he continued. "There's a very limited opportunity. We're in good faith, both on the American side and also on the Mexican side, what's being communicated by the new Mexican president is an intense desire to fully resolve this situation." Zeldin said that he met with Mexican officials for about 90 minutes Monday night to discuss the sewage spewing into U.S. waters — and relayed that the Mexican environmental secretary wants to have a "strong collaborative relationship" with the U.S. to end the pollution. "I will be speaking with the chief of staff to the Mexican environmental secretary to ensure that over the course of the coming days, over the course of the next couple weeks, that we are able to put together a specific statement from both countries on a mutual understanding of what Mexico is going to do to help resolve this issue," he said.
Axios
22-04-2025
- Politics
- Axios
EPA fires or reassigns hundreds of staffers
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to fire or reassign more than 450 staffers working on environmental justice issues, it said Tuesday. Why it matters: The large-scale changes could effectively end much of the EPA's work tackling pollution in historically disadvantaged communities. It's part of the Trump administration's effort to vastly shrink the federal workforce. EPA has around 15,000 employees. Driving the news: EPA notified roughly 280 employees that they will be fired in a "reduction in force." Another 175 who perform "statutory functions" will be reassigned. The employees come from the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, the Office of Inclusive Excellence, and EPA regional offices. "EPA is taking the next step to terminate the Biden-Harris Administration's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Environmental Justice arms of the agency," a spokesperson said. Between the lines: The firings will likely see challenges from congressional Democrats and the employees themselves.
Yahoo
22-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump Celebrates Earth Day by Gutting Key EPA Office
Several employees in the Environmental Protection Agency spent their Earth Day learning that they needed to find new jobs. Hundreds of staffers in the department's Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights were laid off as part of a reduction in force Tuesday, as were employees working on environmental justice and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in regional offices. In February, environmental justice staffers were placed on administrative leave and some of the agency's probationary workers were fired. Now, 280 workers involved with environmental justice and diversity, equity and inclusion will be terminated, with 175 other EPA workers being assigned to new jobs. It's all part of EPA chief Lee Zedlin's pledge to drive 'a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion.' According to an EPA memo obtained by NBC News, the reduction in force will take effect on July 31. The EPA under Trump is ditching its mission of actually protecting the environment. The department rolled back environmental regulations last month along with parts of the Clean Air Act. In addition to the rollbacks and cuts, the agency also tried to cut grants to nonprofit organizations in an attack on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction fund, set up by President Biden with the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. A federal judge temporarily nixed those plans last month. The regulatory changes that Zedlin is pushing with Trump's blessing will harm countless Americans, including Trump's supporters. 'It's practically inevitable' that more people will get sick from reduced regulation and the loss of funding, one EPA staffer anonymously told TNR earlier this month. It's fitting that Tuesday's layoff announcement fell on Earth Day, because the Trump administration has shown that it cares little, if anything, about the earth. The new energy secretary, fracking executive Chris Wright, last month described climate change as the 'side effect of building the modern world.' The FBI has moved to criminalize groups like Habitat for Humanity for receiving grants from the EPA under the Biden administration, and Trump himself has claimed that climate change will provide more seafront property and is therefore better for real estate. The White House is celebrating Earth Day by making the planet worse.
Yahoo
16-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Uncle Sam, Deadbeat Customer
Michelle's company is one of those proud American manufacturing businesses we keep hearing about from the Trump administration, which is doing its level best to wreck her business through its entirely predictable managerial incompetence. Elon Musk proposed to bring that famous 'Move fast, break things' Silicon Valley ethos to the federal government, but he only managed one half of that package—and it wasn't the half you'd want. Here's a portrait of a broken government in miniature: Michelle's company is a Rust Belt industrial concern that makes … let's call it widgets. She is understandably worried about the vindictive character of the current administration and doesn't want to be identified. I'll share this much: She has a lot of clients, both in the private sector and in government, but her No. 1 client in any given year is one of the few federal agencies with which most Americans interact pretty much every day of their lives, and that agency simply cannot carry out its core mission without Michelle's product or a workable substitute, which would have to be made to spec, as Michelle's widget currently is. We aren't talking about the assistant DEI specialist in the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights here—we're talking about a real factory that makes a real product, the absence of which Americans would—in a hurry!—notice. Elon Musk and the rest of these DOGE schmucks are big on 'efficiency'—it's right there in the name!—but that's mainly a matter of rhetoric. As Michelle and other government suppliers can attest, the Trump administration already has shown itself considerably slower and less competent than its predecessors (she's been providing her product to the government for many years), which is not entirely surprising when you consider Trump's penchant for filling leadership roles with people who may know a lot about hosting a weekend morning show (the secretary of defense) or managing a professional wrestling empire (the education secretary) but who don't know the first thing about actually doing the job to which they have been appointed. Michelle's client typically ordered widgets on a roughly quarterly basis. And then came in the new secretary and the DOGE clowns, who had more important things to do than running the agency. And so she ended up getting a panicked call from the No. 2 guy in the department, telling her that they were down to their last couple of boxes of widgets and instructing her to 'move heaven and earth'—at whatever cost—to get them some more. The problem was that they needed that product in a matter of days, while the agency is currently taking weeks or months to approve new purchase orders. Plus, some of the raw materials have a long lead time, taking additional weeks to procure, so Michelle usually needs four or five weeks to fill an order. 'They were out of everything, so it was the biggest order they'd ever placed,' she says. 'And they needed it in a week.' Michelle did a little old-fashioned scrambling and finagling to get the materials she needed from a supplier other than her usual one and got the agency those widgets post haste. At which point the agency—utterly predictably, this being The Trump Show—refused to pay. The agency refused to pay on the grounds that Michelle hadn't followed the standard procurement process—even though making an end-run around the standard procurement process was the whole point of the exercise. That same No. 2 guy eventually reversed that decision, but then the agency started making different demands, for example asking for separate paperwork for the cost of transporting the product instead of the usual process of simply incorporating freight as a line item on the order. According to Michelle, the scuttlebutt was that the Cabinet secretary himself was personally reviewing all new purchase orders—which sounds like admirable dedication to the nuts and bolts of the agency, until you consider that a lot of these orders are for a few hundred dollars to a few thousand—hardly the stuff a Senate-confirmed appointee could not safely delegate. At one point, Michelle had to list the government of the United States of America as a 'delinquent' account and refuse to fill new orders—a first for the longtime supplier. Being delinquent on a bill would be nothing unusual for Donald Trump's personal business operations, which were infamous for stiffing small businesses and mom-and-pop vendors while threatening to litigate them into insolvency if they demanded full payment—but this is the U.S. government. Under the Trump administration, Uncle Sam is a deadbeat. The overdue bill was eventually paid, months late, and subsequent bills have been paid late, too, though not as late. Operations at the agency continue to move as though through molasses, with routine administrative work taking weeks where before it would have taken days, and with different ends of the agency giving contractors such as Michelle contradictory advice and direction. And she's preparing to go through another round of it, because while her supply chain is mostly U.S.-based, one of her major inputs comes from those nefarious … Canadians. That material will be subject to a tariff, which will be passed on to the client, meaning that the tax collectors will tax the taxpayers in order to pay the tax the tax collectors are collecting from … themselves, like something from a William Gaddis novel. But, of course, Michelle doesn't know what the price is going to be, and neither do her suppliers, and, hence, neither do her clients, because nobody knows what the tariff is actually going to be. Trump simply changes his mind from day to day, and Congress apparently has decided that the president gets to be the national sales tax dictator. 'I get my tariff news from X,' she says. 'So, who knows? I'm just tearing my hair out and drinking martinis at night.'
