EPA Budget Would Be Cut in Half With Trump’s 2027 Proposal

The White House wants to hack the EPA’s budget by 52% in fiscal 2027, according to President Donald Trump’s annual spending request released Friday.

The funding plan would lower the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget to $4.2 billion, which would be its lowest level since the Reagan administration.

Some of the biggest cuts are the continued full elimination of the EPA’s environmental justice program, which the White House said promotes “divisive racial discrimination"; the nixing of the Atmospheric Protection Program; and an end to “unrestrained research grants, woke environmental justice work, radical climate research, and skewed, overly-precautionary modeling that infuences regulations.”

Trump’s plan also calls for an end to state revolving funds on the grounds that states should be responsible for financing their own water infrastructure projects, and the elimination of categorical grants, which the administration called “a crutch for states at the expense of taxpayers.”

The drastic cuts in the fiscal 2027 blueprint double down on last year’s budget request, in which Trump called for the agency to be defunded by 54.5%. That plan never took effect, as Congress eventually passed a far less drastic spending measure that only dropped the EPA’s budget by 3.5%.

Under Trump, the agency has shed between 25% to 30% of its staff and either wiped out or deeply slashed several program areas, such as environmental justice and the Office of Research and Development. Those reductions could mean Trump’s proposed cuts reflect the reality that a smaller EPA doesn’t need as much funding as it did when it employed some 15,000 staff members.

But even with a moderately scaled down mission, the EPA still doesn’t have enough staff to execute its basic duties, including inspecting facilities and conducting outreach with communities and companies, according to former staff members and the agency’s union.

The Friday document only lays out high-level dollar figures for each agency and doesn’t include department-level line items.

Last year, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said he wanted to cut 65% of the EPA’s spending by massively curtailing federal grants, reducing its real estate footprint, and developing more uses for AI.

But agency veterans say they worry about the effect the reductions are having on the staff who remain.

“I can’t imagine people are too happy at EPA these days, since the administration has strayed from its mission,” said Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta, the agency’s former principal deputy assistant administrator for science, in an interview with Bloomberg Law March 27.

The White House’s proposal is only a starting point for negotiations and is unlikely to be passed into law. Republican and Democratic budget-writers in Congress must now haggle over their own visions of how the EPA should be funded.