EPA Will Cut Environmental Justice Workers in July, Staff Told

The EPA will start a reduction in force among its remaining environmental justice staff on July 31, according to an internal memo dated Monday and reviewed by Bloomberg Law.

The letter from Travis Voyles, assistant deputy administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency, marks the second official attempt to purge environmental justice employees from the agency.

The EPA put 168 employees in its environmental justice office on administrative leave in February, but an undisclosed number of them later returned to work following a March 13 decision from the US District Court for the District of Maryland, which found the firing of probationary employees at 18 agencies was unlawful.

The July 31 reduction in force is “necessary to align our workforce with the agency’s current and future needs and to ensure the efficient and effective operation of our programs,” Voyles wrote to the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, as well as to the regional offices’ environmental justice divisions.

Voyles did not indicate how many staff would be affected.

“With this action, EPA is delivering organizational improvements to the personnel structure that will directly benefit the American people and better advance the agency’s core mission of protecting human health and the environment,” he wrote.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin told reporters on Monday that the agency is still working on its reorganization plans, and didn’t indicate a timeline.

“We’re just trying to get it right,” Zeldin said. “We’re speaking to political and career staff in all of these different offices.”

Reports of the move was criticized Monday by at least one environmental advocacy group.

“The people that Donald Trump is putting out of work are hardworking, dedicated civil servants who have devoted their careers to protecting our clean air and water and securing a livable future for us all,” Ben Jealous, executive director of the Sierra Club, said in a statement Monday. “The only people who will benefit from their firings are corporate polluters.”

The Sierra Club has received funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the charitable organization founded by Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg Law is operated by entities controlled by Michael Bloomberg.

The Trump administration’s efforts to shed its environmental justice personnel drew a sharp rebuke from seven of former President Joe Biden’s 10 EPA regional administrators, who condemned the move in an April 17 letter to Zeldin.

“The lion’s share of work that EPA does—and needs to expand—is in the places most overburdened by concentrations of pollution sources,” the former regional chiefs wrote. “Why? Because this is where investments in environmental protection have the biggest bang for the buck.”

More broadly, they said much of the EPA’s diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility work—which the Trump administration has sought to cut—is only meant to educate staff about disability laws, outreach to minority groups, and workplace inclusion.

“This is basic human decency and Management 101,” the former regional administrators wrote.