Short-Staffed EPA Leans on Older Adjunct Workers, With No Raises

In a large office in an eastern city, a woman works 36 hours a week at the EPA processing and issuing permits—a task she said only one other person in her office knows how to do.

The woman, who declined to be identified in order to speak freely, is a retiree who works in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Senior Environmental Employment (SEE) program. The program was created nearly four decades ago to let older workers—some of them EPA retirees, but many not—use their skills at the EPA, while keeping active and earning some extra money.