EPA Staff Move to Safeguard Work Amid Worries of Trump’s Return

Environmentalists and career staff at the EPA are taking steps to shield the agency’s work from political influence, fearing that progress they’ve made toward regulating pollution and elevating scientific integrity could get erased if Donald Trump is elected president again.

Driven by memories of Trump’s first term, when officials with political agendas regularly meddled in the work of career scientists, employees at the Environmental Protection Agency and outside groups are looking for more ways to prepare should the former president return to the White House.

The EPA and its largest staff union, the American Federation of Government Employees, ratified a new contract this summer that offers agency staff an avenue to report scientific integrity violations without retribution. While the contract doesn’t bar political appointees from exerting influence, it’s seen as perhaps the strongest available deterrent to political meddling in agency science.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan told reporters in June that, while there are “never any guarantees for the future beyond what we can control,” he believed the scientific integrity language in the union contract would serve as a bulwark against future interference.

Still, the scale at which Trump and his allies have said they intend to remake the civil service threatens even the most robust defenses.

The EPA chapter of Project 2025—the blueprint developed by Trump allies for a new Republican administration—calls for “a diversity of scientific viewpoints” on advisory boards and for the appointment of a science adviser, along with at least six other political appointees, “charged with overseeing and reforming EPA research and science activities.” Trump has recently sought to distance himself from that agenda, but he has been critical of the federal workforce in the past.

Trump, for example, has floated the idea of firing federal workers en masse, replacing them with loyalists. He took a first step in 2020 by establishing a new Schedule F employment category for federal workers that made it significantly easier for a president to fire them. That change was then rolled back by President Joe Biden in 2021.

“We will pass critical reforms making every executive branch employee fireable by the president of the United States,” Trump told a crowd at a South Carolina rally in 2022.

His running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), said in 2021 that Trump should fire “every civil servant” and “replace them with our people.”

“There are policy directions, and then there are fundamental understandings about the way our government should operate,” said Max Stier, president and CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, a government oversight group. “Former President Trump is presenting not actually a very clear view on policy, but a much clearer view about how he wants to change the nature of government.”

Pattern of Violations

Political attacks on science have been around since long before Trump.

More than 300 scientific integrity violations across the federal government have been cataloged by the Union of Concerned Scientists over the last four presidential administrations, including 92 at the EPA. They range from falsifying records to dissolving advisory panels to blocking publication of climate change research.

But the rate at which violations piled up during Trump’s term was unprecedented, said Anita Desikan, a senior analyst at UCS who helped build the tracker.

The group recorded 191 violations during Trump’s four years in office, compared to 95 over eight years during George W. Bush’s administration. Barack Obama’s presidency saw 14 violations, while two have been recorded so far under Biden.

“If we go by that pattern, we can imagine a second Trump administration doing something similar or worse,” Desikan said.

But EPA staffers are better prepared for changes a future Trump administration might try to institute, in part because the union was strengthened by the trials it endured in Trump’s first term, said Joyce Howell, vice president of AFGE Council 238, which represents about half the EPA’s workforce.

“On so many levels, we’re stronger as a union,” Howell said. “We have more people participating. We have monthly town halls, and we blow the doors off our Zoom count every time.”

Still, much of the planning to protect the EPA depends on future officials honoring the union contract and “the world not going completely upside down,” she said.

Changes Needed

Wendy Wagner, a professor of environmental law at the University of Texas at Austin, said structural reforms to the federal rulemaking process are needed to fully insulate science from political influence.

“If you want integrity, you can’t have political officials have the last word on what the science says,” she said. “The Trump administration didn’t create that system, they’re just exploiting it dramatically.”

The huge volume of science conducted by the EPA means certain actions might pass under the radar of political appointees, Wagner said. But for those that catch an official’s eye, there isn’t much that can be done to stop them from interfering in agency science.

“The political appointees, ultimately, are in charge of everything,” Wagner said. “It will be really hard to resist control.”

The EPA would likely issue new rules “as infrequently as possible” under a second Trump administration, Wagner said, and those it does put forward “likely will not be as protective as the best available science would suggest.”

Trump could also use the regulatory process to unwind regulations put forth under Biden, as he did during his first administration. Over the course of his first term, Trump’s EPA issued dozens of rules that eliminated or scaled back climate protections, according to research from the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.

Industries regulated by the EPA could expect to play a much larger role in shaping policy, as they did during Trump’s first term.

But it may be hard to know exactly how far the agency’s actions stray from what its scientists recommend, researchers and advocates said, since much of the rulemaking process is not public.

“All we’ll see is the results,” Wagner said. “It’s a black box, and we won’t know all the manipulations that occurred in getting there.”

Court Challenges

A lack of transparency could complicate efforts by environmental or good governance advocates to file lawsuits challenging rules that don’t follow the science.

Tim Whitehouse, the executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, said it’s already difficult for citizen groups to get the information they need in order to challenge an EPA decision.

Career staffers within the agency are best positioned to bring concerns to light, he said. “If they don’t feel confident speaking up, if they don’t feel protected in developing their own science and defending it, then the system will collapse.”

The best way to protect science from politics would be through legislation like the Scientific Integrity Act, said Desikan of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Introduced by Rep. Paul Tonko (D-N.Y.), the bill would require agencies involved in scientific research to adopt and enforce an integrity policy that includes protections from political influence. But, lacking support from Republicans, the bill has languished in a House committee for more than a year.

In the absence of legislation, “the courts are at best an incomplete answer to challenges that are about trying to make the agencies operate on the basis of fact and evidence,” said Stier of the Partnership for Public Service.

The Biden administration has already taken the most effective, albeit limited, steps it can to shield its work from a future president, said Stan Meiburg, a longtime EPA staffer who once served as acting deputy administrator: finalizing key regulations before they can be overturned under the Congressional Review Act.

Those rules may still be challenged in court, and a future Trump administration could seek to nullify them with statutory changes. But those steps take time and may face hurdles from the recent Supreme Court decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which makes it harder for an administration to overturn a regulation based on its policy preferences, said Meiburg, now executive director of Wake Forest University’s environment and sustainability center.

Whistleblowers could also play an important role in bringing violations to light in a new administration, as they often have in the past, Wagner said. Shoring up protections for them would, in her view, be among the strongest actions the current administration could take to protect government scientists. Still, a future Trump administration could move with few impediments to weaken those protections.

Political appointees may take other steps to undercut the EPA’s work without directly violating safeguards for scientific integrity. The first Trump administration reorganized employees into research areas where they lacked expertise, a move Whitehouse said forced the agency to rely on science from outside groups with commercial interest in the results. Watchdog groups expect a second Trump administration to employ the same tactic.

Many EPA staffers may simply resign if Trump wins, Howell said, figuring an early retirement or a job in the private sector is preferable to being fired or ignored at a politicized EPA.

“The risk here is the expertise is lost,” Stier said, “and choices are no longer informed by science and evidence but rather by the outcomes that are desired to benefit political leaders.”