EPA plowed ahead Monday with overhauls of its air, enforcement and land offices in moves that — for now — keeps alive the popular Energy Star program.
The agency posted changes on the individual websites of the Office of Air and Radiation, Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, and Office of Land and Emergency Management.
In an email, spokesperson Brigit Hirsch said the changes “will directly benefit the American people and better advance the agency’s core mission, while Powering the Great American Comeback,” a reference to the administration’s slogan for its EPA agenda.
The agency, meanwhile, “continues to work through the reorganization process for the remaining program offices and will provide updates as they become available,” Hirsch added.
She didn’t respond to followup requests for more detail on the reorganization’s expected benefits and whether employee layoffs — technically known as reductions in force — will accompany any of the three reorganizations.
POLITICO’s E&E News reported last week that EPA was poised to unveil new structures for the air and solid waste offices. The potential impact of the enforcement office makeover left one retired agency official scratching his head.
“It doesn’t look like it did anything dramatic, but it’s hard to tell without more detail,” Larry Starfield, who served as the enforcement office’s principal deputy assistant administrator, said in an interview.
A new organizational chart for the land office shows a pared-down Office of Land and Emergency Management, down from 10 suboffices to five. The Superfund, federal facilities and emergency response offices have been condensed into one — the Office of Superfund and Emergency Management — and gone are the stand-alone offices dedicated to communications, management and staffing.
OLEM’s other flagship programs, including Brownfield grants, resource conservation and regulating underground storage tanks, saw few changes to their organizational structures. While Trump administration officials have voiced intentions to expedite hazardous waste cleanups with fewer resources, it is still not clear how the redesign will impact daily functions.
For the air office, however, the changes loom as the most significant since implementation of the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments.
Gone are the Office of Atmospheric Protection, which handled most of EPA’s climate work, and the Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards (OAQPS), which set national limits for smog, soot and other common pollutants and wrote regulations for power plants and other industries.
To varying degrees, the standards office’s responsibilities will now be divvied out among the newly created Office of Clean Air Programs and the Office of State Air Partnerships.
“Overall, I can’t say this is a bad thing for OAQPS as the functions all still seem to be there,” Chet Wayland, a retired senior air manager, told E&E News in a text message after reviewing the new structure. “But the reality of what each of those branches gets tasked to actually work on will be interesting.”
Wayland saw no evidence of greenhouse gas or climate initiatives surviving in the new structure.
Meanwhile, Energy Star, the energy efficiency rating program for appliances, has been moved from the now defunct Office of Atmospheric Protection to the Office of Radiation and Indoor Air.
What’s next for Energy Star?
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s plan to abolish Energy Star provoked opposition from both industry and environmentalists. The New York Times on Saturday reported that Zeldin is reconsidering. But Hirsch said Monday that “no final decision has been made at this time.”
It’s unclear how much economic activity is generated by Energy Star, as it “does not preclude the purchase or sales of any product,” Hirsch said.
“The Trump EPA is committed to being good stewards of taxpayer dollars and a program that essentially is a government-sponsored advertising scheme doesn’t seem like a good use of hard-working Americans’ money,” she said.
Two people familiar with internal operations said the fate of the program remains uncertain.
“I think [EPA] realized it’s a little more complicated … given how many industries use it,” said a person granted anonymity because they are not authorized to speak on internal deliberations.
“It doesn’t seem like they’ve made any decision,” the person said.
Unlike the Department of Energy’s mandatory efficiency rules, Energy Star is voluntary. EPA sets standards that businesses can choose to meet and verify independently before displaying the program’s blue label on appliances, buildings and homes.
Energy Start supporters say federal data shows that the program saves consumers and businesses more than $40 billion a year — an amount higher than its annual appropriations.
More than 1,000 companies, cities and organizations sent a letter to EPA in April urging support for Energy Star, which they called “among the most successful public-private partnerships in U.S. history.”
Zeldin has called for privatizing the program, telling lawmakers in May it requires “a big taxpayer-funded staff.”
The restructurings unveiled Monday arrived about two weeks after EPA announced comparable reorganizations of its chemical safety and research wings. Throughout the process, agency leaders have provided little information on staffing or the potential effects on the agency’s mission to protect human health and the environment.
The restructurings are all part of an agencywide retrenchment that Zeldin announced this spring in the course of a downsizing drive predicted to save more than $300 million this fiscal year and cut EPA’s workforce to levels close to those found during the Reagan administration.
Reporter Ellie Borst contributed.
