The Trump administration is illegally blocking employees in EPA’s environmental justice program from seeking jobs elsewhere in the agency, a worker advocacy group alleges.
At issue are staffers who were forced to take paid leave in a prelude to their potential firing as part of President Donald Trump’s governmentwide crusade against programs purportedly tied to “diversity, equity and inclusion.”
“Our understanding is that employees on administrative leave are denied access to email (where positions are often advertised internally) and hiring systems such as Talent Hub where open position descriptions are posted and through which candidates may apply,” Laura Dumais, staff counsel for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, told EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin in a letter last week.
The lockout violates a variety of requirements embedded in federal law, Dumais added, including the right to compete for employment and a ban on discrimination “on the basis of non-performance-related factors.” She asked EPA to immediately grant all idled staff access to its email system and to Talent Hub.
After EPA on May 2 announced new organizational structures for four offices, the agency posted an undisclosed number of available positions on Talent Hub, its internal job board.
An agency spokesperson said “all EPA employees are eligible to apply” to the new job openings.
Dumais followed up Tuesday with an email to Zeldin after EPA’s press office has repeatedly asserted that claim to reporters.
“This is flatly false,” Dumais wrote.
As of publication time Wednesday, Zeldin had not replied to either the email or last week’s letter, Dumais said. Asked for comment, an EPA spokesperson said only that the agency would respond to PEER “through appropriate channels.”
The number of EPA staff who may be affected by the alleged lockout is unclear. The agency put 168 employees involved in environmental justice work on leave in early February, although some of those were reportedly later called back.
Last month, about 280 staffers were warned of a looming reduction in force, a government term for layoffs, or were notified of a reorganization that would send them elsewhere within the agency. All worked on environmental justice or DEI initiatives, according to an EPA spokesperson.
Among them is Swati Rayasam, an environmental protection specialist based in the San Francisco Bay area on leave for the last three months. Rayasam is one of the employees represented by PEER in a complaint brought last month to the Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal watchdog charged with enforcing federal worker protections, that seeks to return them to work.
In an email exchange with POLITICO’s E&E News this week, Rayasam likened EPA’s behavior to a purge.
Neither the agency nor the Office of Personnel Management has provided any justification “for why we are not eligible,” Rayasam wrote, “and I personally cannot understand why, as a scientist and toxics expert, I am being prevented from competing for positions I am legitimately qualified for except that I work for the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights.”
Limbo and unease
As the Trump administration advances plans for both restructuring and unprecedented budget cuts, unease is rippling throughout EPA.
Already, the agency’s Office of Research and Development is set to be gutted as a stand-alone entity under the first phase of the reorganization announced by Zeldin earlier this month. Employees elsewhere are in limbo.
“It’s tough to kind of wait to see if the anvil’s going to drop,” said Miles Batson, vice president of an American Federation of Government Employees local that represents staff at the agency’s National Enforcement Investigations Center and its Denver-based regional office.
Batson joined in a Tuesday “all-hands” meeting of hundreds of employees at EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance at which they were told that “organizational improvements are still evolving,” he said, but with no timetable on how their programs could be affected.
While restructuring of OECA has been talked about, Batson said, “Nothing has been written down in hard ink yet.”
Reorganization decisions also face an uncertain future in the courts. A decision out of a federal court in California last week ordered the Trump administration to pause layoffs throughout the government.
That court order, which the administration is appealing, was cited as the reason for postponing a “RIF Basics Briefing given by OPM,” previously scheduled for May 20, according to an email sent Tuesday by EPA’s Human Resources Operations seen by E&E News.
EPA acknowledged but did not immediately respond to questions about which employees received the email.
Sean Reilly and Ellie Borst can be reached on Signal at SeanReilly.70 and eborst.64.
