Top EPA appointees acted swiftly and provided virtually no written explanation internally for firing members of two science advisory committees, a hardball move that could have significant implications for hallmark environmental and public health protections.
“All good–Do what y’all need to do,” then-Assistant Deputy Administrator Travis Voyles wrote in a Jan. 28 email roughly an hour before the agency began informing dozens of members of the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee and the Science Advisory Board that they were being cashiered as part of a wholesale “reset.”
“It is done,” Voyles added later that day, minutes after getting confirmation that the notifications were complete. The emails were included in roughly 100 pages of emails released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from POLITICO’s E&E News.
The firings were among EPA’s first official acts under President Donald Trump’s second administration, which has since trumpeted plans for thousands of job cuts and an unprecedented wave of regulatory rollbacks.
Notably absent from the records is any discussion of the rationale for the removals, which furthered a trend dating back to Trump’s first term of treating science advisers more like disposable political appointees instead of neutral experts in their fields.
The consequences for the administration’s environmental agenda may now become clear only when EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin names replacement members for both panels.
His choices could be particularly pivotal for the CASAC, which is charged with providing outside expertise to high-stakes reviews of ambient air quality standards for a half-dozen pollutants.
Those assessments, which take years, rank among EPA’s weightiest regulatory tasks under the Clean Air Act.
They have the potential to drive life-saving improvements to national air quality, but may also lead to stricter pollution control requirements on a wide swath of businesses. Three such reviews — for airborne lead, smog-forming nitrogen oxides and ozone — were launched either during Trump’s first term or former President Joe Biden’s tenure. It will now be up to the second Trump administration to continue them.
Zeldin’s picks for the committee “will have a significant impact on where this comes out,” David Amerikaner, a partner with law firm Duane Morris, said in an interview. It would be “on brand,” Amerikaner said, if the reconstituted committee “leans towards retaining existing standards, rather than tightening anything.”
The repercussions could be less pronounced, but still significant for the Science Advisory Board, which usually encompasses between 40 and 50 members from a range of disciplines and serves as an in-house think tank for EPA on scientific and technical issues.
The board also has the authority to scrutinize the quality of the science underlying EPA regulatory proposals. During Trump’s first term, the panel irked administration appointees with stinging critiques of various draft rollbacks. In what some members saw as payback, then-EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler stripped rank-and-file board members of any role in deciding which proposed rules warranted attention.
Wheeler’s policy was discarded under Biden. Six months into Trump’s second term, however, concerns are simmering that the administration is again maneuvering to undercut the two panels’ independence.
“We’ve seen the process attempted to be compromised in the past and I’m concerned that it might be happening again,” said Chris Zarba, who headed the EPA office that provides staff support for the panels before retiring in 2018. He then joined the Environmental Protection Network, a group made up mostly of former agency employees opposed to Trump administration policies.
‘Reverse the politicization’
Trump had been back in office barely a week when Voyles, whose title is now associate deputy administrator, and a handful of other appointees moved to disband both panels.
Besides Voyles, the officials involved included Chad McIntosh, then the agency’s acting deputy administrator; James Payne, an EPA attorney at that point serving as acting administrator; and Aaron Szabo, who on Wednesday won Senate confirmation to head EPA’s air office.
Exactly what prompted them to act even before Zeldin was sworn in as administrator is not specified in their emails. EPA declined to allow any of them to be interviewed.
But the EPA chapter of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation governing blueprint that has served as a cue for many administration policies, recommended “Resetting science advisory boards to expand opportunities for a diversity of scientific viewpoints free of potential conflicts of interest.”
What that means in practice is still to be seen. EPA has since sought nominations to restock both the CASAC and the Science Advisory Board, but has not specified a timetable for Zeldin to make his final choices.
In response to emailed questions, EPA spokesperson Carolyn Holran said the administration is seeking to “to reverse the politicization” of the two panels during Biden’s tenure.
She was referring to then-Administrator Michael Regan’s March 2021 decisionto fire all CASAC and SAB members in what was also labeled a reset.
Regan eventually reappointed some of the ousted members. As grounds for the removals he also alluded a federal court’s decision to strike down a policy from Trump’s first term that barred EPA grant recipients from serving on agency advisory committees and Wheeler’s 2018 decision to dismiss an adjunct CASAC panel that was helping with a review of national soot standards.
The second Trump administration has not flagged any specific irregularities in how Regan then proceeded to reconstitute the two panels. Once Trump returned to office in January, their fate was clearly high on the administration’s agenda.
‘They have been let go’
Only a week had passed since Trump’s inauguration when Voyles and several other appointees got a Jan. 27 briefing on the advisers’ work from Tom Brennan, a career official who had succeeded Zarba as director of what is formally known as the Science Advisory Board Staff Office.
“Thank you for the time today Tom!” Voyles wrote back.
By the next day, rapid-fire discussions were underway between the appointees to craft what would eventually become a boilerplate, three-paragraph email informing the advisers of their dismissals. What appear to be drafts of the emails are redacted under an exemption that allows agencies to withhold information used in internal deliberations, the documents received under FOIA show.
There was a quick move to run the wording by EPA lawyers. “The plan is then for me to send it to Tom Brennan this aft or tonight,” Payne wrote late on the afternoon of Jan. 28, using an abbreviation for afternoon.
Cut out of the loop was Brennan, who was charged with making the actual notifications to dozens of researchers that their three-year assignments as “special government employees” were ending — in some cases just months after they were appointed.
“Hello teammates,” he wrote afterward to staff office colleagues. “Today, I [forwarded an] email from Acting Administrator Payne to all SAB and CASAC members (and active Panel members) informing them they have been let go from their service as SGEs. I just learned about that decision late in the day today.”
Brennan, who has since left EPA under one of its early retirement offerings, declined to comment. Many of the records released by the agency reflect ensuing email traffic between him and panel members from the University of Texas, Cornell University and other schools.
In the notifications forwarded by Brennan, those researchers were told that “EPA is working to update these federal advisory committees to ensure that the agency receives scientific advice consistent with its legal obligations to advance our core mission.”
“I can’t say I’m surprised,” one researcher told Brennan.
Elsewhere at EPA, press aides were working after hours to come up with a prepared response to media inquiries after news of the firings quickly became public.
“I’ve got one,” Molly Vaseliou, now the Office of Public Affairs’ associate administrator, wrote at 7:05 p.m. on the 28th.
Vaseliou’s statement, which recycled some of the language in the dismissal email, said that EPA was working to update the two panels “to ensure that the agency receives scientific advice consistent with its legal obligations to advance our core mission.”
It worked for Voyles.
“Not responding, but still agree with just sticking to the statement Molly provided,” he wrote after getting a request for comment from E&E News. “Coverage so far doesn’t prompt me to suggest otherwise.”
This reporter can be reached on Signal at SeanReilly.70.
