The Environmental Protection Agency—the federal watchdog tasked with safeguarding the environment and human health—is facing “unprecedented” attacks under the new Trump administration, putting Americans’ ability to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and live healthy lives at risk, experts warn.  

These attacks on the EPA, from mass terminations of employees to axing programs and funding intended to address pollution and advance clean energy, are part of a sweeping effort now underway to dismantle the administrative state. It’s a strategy specifically called for under Project 2025—the governing blueprint spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation and backed by over 100 right-wing organizations.  

“With astonishing speed and disregard, Trump and his team are delivering on the promises of Project 2025,” said Stephanie Reese, director of strategic implementation and justice for Mom’s Clean Air Force. Reese was speaking at a press conference held earlier this month outside EPA headquarters, where environmental activists and Democratic members of Congress spoke out in protest of actions to undermine the agency by the Elon Musk–led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The event was among many organized rallies outside the federal agencies that DOGE has targeted and infiltrated since President Trump took office, unleashing chaos and cuts affecting virtually all parts of the executive branch. 

At the EPA, there has been an exodus of employees, a freeze on funding disbursement—including funds already authorized by Congress—as well as a dismissal of scientific advisory boards and a removal of climate change references from the agency’s website. Trump is installing industry lobbyists in key leadership posts, while his pick to head the agency—former New York Republican Congress member Lee Zeldin—has announced a set of five pillars to guide the EPA’s work, most of which deviate from the agency’s core mission to protect human health and the environment. Among the EPA’s new priorities under administrator Zeldin are “bringing back American auto jobs,” focusing on leading the world in artificial intelligence, and boosting fossil fuel development by pursuing “energy dominance” and permitting reform. 

Michelle Roos, executive director of the Environmental Protection Network and a former EPA staffer, called these pillars “extraordinarily disingenuous.” “I think it speaks to a massive ignorance of what EPA does,” she told Sierra.  

“The severity of attacks on career staff and on the basic functioning of the EPA are unprecedented."

What is perhaps most concerning, Roos said, are the threats to government workers and widespread personnel terminations that risk crippling many agencies and departments, including the EPA. Just over a month into the new administration, hundreds of EPA staff have already been fired, placed on administrative leave, or pushed or incentivized into resigning. More than 300 career staffers have departed the agency since the November election, and on February 14, Trump fired nearly 400 probationary employees.  

“When you incentivize all the folks close to retirement to leave, and you fire all the new people that have just come on, you are decimating the ability of the agency to recover,” Roos said. “You’re getting rid of all the institutional knowledge and all the new blood. So I think that is the most frightening thing.”

“The severity of attacks on career staff and on the basic functioning of the EPA are unprecedented,” Roos added. 

During a February 26 cabinet meeting, Trump reportedly said that the EPA would shrink its workforce by 65 percent. The White House later walked back that comment, saying he meant to say "spending" instead of "workforce."

Earlier this month, the EPA confirmed that it had placed 171 employees on administrative leave, including 160 who do environmental-justice work. That move followed reports that Trump appointees were planning to shutter the agency’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights. 

Environmental advocates condemned the move. “The Trump EPA is turning its back on those who need a cleaner environment more than anyone,” said Matthew Tejada, senior vice president for environmental health at the Natural Resources Defense Council and former head of the EPA’s environmental-justice office. Shuttering this office will result in “more toxic contaminants, dangerous air, and unsafe water” in communities already overburdened by industrial pollution, he warned. 

Democratic members of Congress have also slammed Trump’s EPA for illegally withholding funds for environmental and clean energy programs and projects, appropriated under the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. 

“Thousands of EPA projects worth tens of billions of dollars have been illegally shut down, shut off, and shut out of funding in red and blue states alike,” Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said during the February 6 press conference outside the EPA headquarters. Just before the event, he and several of his colleagues went inside the building and asked to meet with Zeldin and DOGE representatives but were denied access. 

In addition to freezing funds, Zeldin is attempting to revoke $20 billion in funding already disbursed for clean energy projects under the IRA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. “The days of irresponsibly shoveling boatloads of cash to far-left activist groups in the name of environmental justice and climate equity are over,” Zeldin said in a video posted to X on February 12. 

Environmental advocates and congressional Democrats are pushing back, arguing that the move is illegal and harmful to the communities that stand to benefit from clean energy jobs and reduced pollution. “Attempting to claw back funds already disbursed to help us avoid the very worst of the climate crisis is as illogical as it is illegal,” Sierra Club executive director Ben Jealous said in a statement. Democratic members of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works wrote to Zeldin on February 24 demanding answers about the effort to rescind these funds. 

Now the EPA is reportedly set on trying to reverse its own science-based finding from 2009 that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. The finding, which stems from the 2007 Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, underpins the EPA’s legal obligation to regulate climate pollution under the Clean Air Act. Trump’s executive order on energy directed the EPA administrator to, within 30 days, issue recommendations to the Office of Management and Budget on the “legality and continued applicability” of the 2009 endangerment finding. This directive aligns with Project 2025’s call for the EPA to establish a system to “update” the finding. 

“Reversing the endangerment finding makes about as much sense as trying to repeal the law of gravity."

“Updating can really only mean one thing: to overturn it,” Ann Carlson, an environmental law professor and faculty director of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA, wrote in a recent blog piece. 

That is what Zeldin has recommended, as first reported by The Washington Post. “Reversing the endangerment finding makes about as much sense as trying to repeal the law of gravity,” Jason Rylander, legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, said in a statement responding to the reporting. 

A review of the endangerment finding appears to be just one of the many indications that the Trump administration is currently implementing the detailed policy agenda outlined in Project 2025. The agenda recommended the EPA be largely gutted and called for changes like freezing existing regulations, eliminating employees, and stopping all grants to advocacy groups—all of which have now happened. Another agency that conducts critical climate change research and science, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has similarly faced attacks and deep staffing cuts in recent weeks. Project 2025 specifically said that NOAA should be “broken up and downsized.” 

“That is the playbook. They said what they were going to do, and they’re doing it,” Roos said. 

During the press conference outside the EPA headquarters, Democratic members of Congress said that they would fight back against the unprecedented attacks on the agency. 

“Gutting the EPA is an effort to undermine the bedrock environmental laws like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. These laws protect against pollution that cause cancer, and asthma, and COPD,” said Representative Maxine Dexter, who represents Oregon’s third district and is also a physician. “Trump’s assault on the EPA is about giving polluters a free pass. And we will use every tactic we have at our disposal to push back.” 

Roos warned that the administration’s assault on the EPA will ultimately endanger Americans’ health and well-being. “The damage is to human health,” she told Sierra. “We will be less healthy. We will be less safe. There will be an increase in the severity of asthma attacks, in premature deaths, in cancer, because of the actions of this administration.”