EPA is requiring its employees to clear big-ticket spending with that agency’s DOGE team, according to new guidance issued by the agency.
That guidance requires spending on transactions that surpass $50,000 to receive approval from one of EPA’s DOGE team members, says a copy of the guidance obtained by POLITICO’s E&E News. EPA’s guidance also requires confirmation that spending aligns with President Donald Trump’s executive orders and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s agenda for the agency.
The Associated Press first reported on the guidance Friday.
After an initial barrage of spending cuts and moves to place employees on leave, EPA has also reinstated some of its environmental justice and civil rights staff.
Some employees in EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights who had been placed on administrative leave were reinstated this week, said Nicole Cantello, who leads a union local that represents employees in EPA’s Chicago-based regional office.
The Washington Post reported Friday that dozens of EPA environmental justice staffers had been reinstated.
Matthew Tejada, who was deputy assistant administrator for environmental justice at EPA under the Biden administration, said it is not clear why some people are being called back and others are not. “[Nobody] knows exactly who or how many or why other than individual anecdotes from individual staff implicated,” Tejada, who is now senior vice president of environmental health at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a text message Friday.
But Chitra Kumar, a former senior staffer in the environmental justice office, said that some regional EPA employees put on leave have job duties that are predominantly in other areas, such as tribal affairs, resource management and implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act.
“When you actually look at what they did, some of them have been brought back,” said Kumar who is now managing director for climate and energy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
EPA and the White House did not respond to inquiries about the guidance or about reinstated employees.
The agency’s new directive marks the Trump EPA’s latest move to clamp down on agency spending as part of a governmentwide push led by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency operation. Zeldin has embraced the cost-cutting effort and said he’d like to slash more than 65 percent of his agency’s spending.
The spending guidance also comes as the Trump administration’s critics are growing increasingly wary of the influence Musk and DOGE are having across the federal government. Trump gathered Musk and members of his Cabinet on Thursday, where he stressed that agency bosses — not Musk — are in charge of their departments.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, urged Zeldin to “immediately reverse” the policy requiring DOGE approval in a letter to the agency Friday. He said it could needlessly delay environmental projects, including air and water quality monitoring and the disposal of hazardous waste.
“[The] involvement of Elon Musk’s unvetted, inexperienced team raises serious concerns about improper external influence on specialized agency decision-making,” Whitehouse wrote.
“Allowing unskilled, self-proclaimed ‘experts,’ not vetted for conflicts of interest, to have veto power over funding determinations is inappropriate and risks compromising the agency’s mission to protect public health and the environment,” the letter continued.
One EPA employee said they’d received four different versions of the guidance since last week.
The employee, who was granted anonymity because they are not authorized to talk to the media, said they were told at one point that the guidance was not mandatory but later told that it was. The employee said they were also notified Friday that congressionally directed spending projects are exempt from the DOGE sign-off process, but other programs “are not so lucky,” they added.
Reporter Sean Reilly contributed.
