‘Caught off guard’: EPA proposes to fire hundreds of scientists todayheadline

The mood was grim at a town hall meeting called by the Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday. The gathering came one day after The New York Times reported a bombshell — Lee Zeldin, the agency’s administrator, plans to dismantle its Office of Research and Development, eliminating 50 to 75 percent of its 1,500 or so chemists, toxicologists, biologists, and other experts. The department, which conducts essential research to inform federal policies, plays a critical role in the agency’s mission to safeguard public health and the environment. Laying off most of its staff, many of whom are career scientists, would leave the EPA without the independent and rigorous science needed to develop effective regulations. No one consulted the office’s leaders about the plan.

Maureen Gwinn, who leads the Office of Research and Development, or ORD, is not a political appointee, and her team learned about the specifics of the proposal when they read about it in the Times. Managers quickly set up an all-hands with the department staff to discuss it.

“There was no preparation,” Holly Wilson, an EPA employee and president of the union that represents its employees, told Grist. “They were caught off guard, and acting as good leaders, wanted to bring their folks together and add some context around what happened.”

Employees from all over the country dialed into the call, which lasted about 30 minutes. They wanted to know when the layoffs would begin, how they would be notified if they were being terminated, and whether buyouts would be offered. One person asked if they could publish their research after being fired. Management had few specific answers.

The Times’ reporting was based on documents the EPA provided to the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. The proposal, which was submitted to the White House last week and could change in the coming days, calls for dissolving the research office, firing most of its employees, and reassigning those who remain to other roles. Under the plan, the agency would seek a waiver to halve the standard notice period for a “reduction in force” from 30 to 60 days. 

“We don’t know which jobs, which pieces are going to go away and which ones stay,” said Wilson. “The uncertainty is what’s causing a lot of the angst.”

It is the latest assault on the agency. Over the last two months, the Trump administration has fired more than 400 of its probationary workers, only to reinstate them after a court mandated it. The agency also shuttered its Office of Environmental Justice and froze funding for various climate programs. 

EPA employees had been bracing for these changes. In implementing President Donald Trump’s executive order to reduce the federal workforce, the Office of Management and Budget has required agencies to submit phase two of their “reduction in force” plans by April 14. The Office of Research and Development is the largest department within the agency, and often the subject of presidential efforts to rein it in or expand it. Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for Trump’s second term, specifically foreshadowed the current events. It recommended eliminating “several ORD offices and programs,” and called the department “bloated, unaccountable, closed, outcome-driven, hostile to public and legislative input, and inclined to pursue political rather than purely scientific goals.”

Still, the scale of the proposed rollbacks has caught almost everyone off guard. “What’s new is the extreme nature of this,” said a senior EPA official, who requested anonymity given the sensitivity of the topic. “This is not designed to cut expenses, it’s designed to destroy” the department. 

Democrats have pushed back, arguing that the office’s functions are protected by federal law and eliminating it is illegal. “Every decision EPA makes must be in furtherance of protecting human health and the environment, and that just can’t happen if you gut EPA science,” Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), ranking member of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, said in a statement to Grist. “Donald Trump and Elon Musk are putting their polluter buddies’ bottom lines over the health and safety of Americans.”

Republican members of the committee did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did the Heritage Foundation, a major backer of Project 2025, or the EPA. 

The Office of Research and Development supports six research programs through offices in 10 facilities. It works alongside EPA offices that oversee air and water quality, chemical safety, toxic chemicals, and children’s health, and its research division is responsible for answering key questions that others within the agency rely on to develop policies. This split of duties has allowed its researchers to produce independent science detailing, among other things, the health impacts of algal blooms, soot exposure, and toxic chemicals such as hexavalent chromium, ethylene oxide, formaldehyde, and chloroprene. 

This work provides the foundation for many of the environmental and public health regulations safeguarding people nationwide. For instance, its work was central to regulation of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, a class of compounds abbreviated as PFAS and nicknamed “forever chemicals” because they do not easily degrade in the environment. Nearly two decades ago, EPA researchers collected water samples along the Cape Fear River in North Carolina where a chemical facility was discharging its waste. They found these chemicals in the samples, and in the drinking water supply for the nearby city of Wilmington. This research made the ubiquity of PFAS clear and established that the public was being exposed to it through drinking water. 

In the years since, the Office of Research and Development helped develop methods to identify and measure PFAS in the environment, understand the risks of human exposure, and develop the technologies that would destroy them, said Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta, who worked at the EPA for 40 years and led the research office during part of President Trump’s first term. Last year, the agency finalized the first rules governing PFAS levels in drinking water. 

The office has “played a huge role in characterizing and opening our awareness of the contamination of our environment by PFAS compounds,” Orme-Zavaleta said. 

Without the research office, it’s unclear where the EPA might turn for scientific analysis. To a degree, officials could increasingly classify decisions as policy rather than science-based and minimize, or skip, research altogether. Some functions could shift to other parts of the agency, like the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, which is now headed by Nancy Beck, a former chemical industry lobbyist. The government also could simply rely upon science funded by the very industries it regulates.

“That’s the fox guarding the hen house,” said the senior official. “The EPA makes critical decisions that determine our public health. Do you want those informed by industry hearsay or real facts?”
Eliminating the Office of Research and Development is the most drastic proposal from the Trump administration to reshape the EPA — but it’s unlikely to be the last. The research office accounts for just 10 percent of the agency’s resources, according to Orme-Zavaleta, a short way toward Zeldin’s stated goal of eliminating 65 percent of the agency’s spending. As Orme-Zavaleta puts it, “many more shoes are going to be dropping.”