The president says staff at the agency included ‘a lot of people that weren’t doing their job.’
WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump announced that the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, was moving to lay off almost two-thirds of his agency’s employees.
“I spoke with Lee Zeldin, and he thinks he’s going to be cutting 65 or so percent of people from environmental,” Trump said.
According to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the EPA employs over 18,000 people, with over 17,000 of them being permanent workers.
Trump said staff at the agency included “a lot of people that weren’t doing their job—they were just obstructionists.”
He also alleged that many staff in the agency “didn’t exist.”
Trump announced the prospective layoffs during his first Cabinet meeting on Feb. 26. The president was flanked by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Elon Musk, who is leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a temporary, non-Cabinet organization, also attended the meeting.
The EPA has faced cutbacks under previous Republican executives. President Ronald Reagan’s EPA administrator, Anne Gorsuch, the mother of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, cut staff by 21 percent from 1981 through 1983. The agency’s budget fell under Reagan and late in the second term of President George W. Bush.
During the first 18 months of Trump’s first term, the agency shed over 1,500 employees. Its workforce grew under Biden, rising from 14,297 in fiscal year 2021 to 15,130 in fiscal year 2024.
The House budget resolution that passed by two votes late on Feb. 25 instructs the committee with jurisdiction over the EPA, Energy, and Commerce, to save $880 billion. That committee’s jurisdiction also includes Medicare, Medicaid, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health, among many other programs and agencies.
On Feb. 14, Zeldin announced a plan to seek the return of $20 billion in environmental funding dating to the Biden administration.
The likely staffing cuts come amid workforce reductions across the federal government, sometimes in conjunction with the auditing of federal agencies by Musk’s DOGE. Those cuts have met with pushback, including from the Merit Systems Protection Board, an independent agency designed “to protect federal merit systems against partisan political and other prohibited personnel practices.”
The board stayed the terminations of six employees, one each from the departments of Education, Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Energy, Housing and Urban Development, and the Office of Personnel Management, in line with a previous decision from the Office of Special Counsel.
During Zeldin’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee, Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.) questioned him about the possibility of mass terminations.
“Do you support firing 75 percent of EPA employees?” Alsobrooks asked Zeldin.
Zeldin said he was not aware of any layoffs at the EPA during Trump’s first administration and hadn’t been told about it.
“I want to make sure that my job as EPA administrator is to increase productivity, is to make sure that we are efficient and accountable and transparent,” he said.
Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.