The government shutdown has sent uneven shock waves through Washington.
Many climate-related operations have been frozen, leaving offices in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, empty of staffers. Others, such as EPA, continue to work — at least for now — on priorities outlined by President Donald Trump, like his campaign to roll back climate regulations.
Here is how the shutdown is affecting federal climate activities.
Interior
The Interior Department will furlough about half of its 58,600 employees but will continue permitting fossil fuel projects during the shutdown. The decision aligns with the “energy emergency” that Trump declared on his first day in office.
Interior’s Bureau of Land Management, which oversees onshore energy permitting, will retain more than half of its 9,250 employees during the shutdown. Many of those people work in public safety roles, like border patrol or law enforcement.
BLM energy staff will also stay on the job to process fossil fuel permits with money generated by permit fees, according to a copy of BLM’s shutdown plan.
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, however, will furlough more than 70 percent of its staff. BOEM, which oversees offshore energy development, “will cease all renewable energy activities,” but employees focused on upcoming oil and gas lease sales will continue to work, according to a copy of the bureau’s plan.
Health and Human Services
Environmental experts are among the two-thirds of all staff members who have been furloughed at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That includes everyone in the National Asthma Control Program and all civil servants in the Climate and Health Program, where just one officer from the Public Health Service will continue working.
The furloughs come during a tumultuous year for the agency’s environmental programs. In April, the Department of Health and Human Services, which houses CDC, attempted to dissolve its entire environmental health division by sending reduction-in-force notices to all staff at the National Center for Environmental Health.
Employees were on administrative leave for two months before HHS did an about-face and brought back many of those civil servants, even as the Trump administration proposed zeroing out some of CDC’s environmental programs, including its climate office.
One asthma program staffer who spoke to POLITICO’s E&E News said the division “had just recovered from the RIF” and only recently sent out grant funds.
Some of those programs help states respond to outdoor air pollution, like wildfire smoke.
“We were re-engaging partners this week to figure out how to pick up and move forward from here,” said the person, who was granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
With the shutdown, those partners are “right back where they were during the RIF — without CDC subject matter experts to hold up their end of what is designed to be a cooperative agreement between CDC and funded partners.”
The department’s contingency staffing plan for the shutdown notes that occupational health programs at CDC, like the World Trade Center Health Program, will continue during the closure. But it adds that “CDC communication to the American public about health-related information will be hampered.”
“Response to public inquiries about public health matters would be suspended,” it says.
A CDC climate expert said an extended shutdown could mean online tools that are used to track heat-related health impacts could stop working — just as they did during the period of RIFs.
Nevertheless, staff morale remains even, even after the president threatened widespread firings, said the expert, who was granted anonymity for fear of retribution.
“We were already fired once,” the person said. “We’re ignoring their threats and just doing the best job we can under the circumstances.”
EPA
EPA staff has not been furloughed yet — but they still might be.
As the clock ticked toward a shutdown on Tuesday evening, a wide swath of EPA employees — including those who work on climate change — received emails from a generic agency address directing them to report to work the following day.
It said, “you work on activities which currently have available funds and thus are currently exempted from the shutdown.”
E&E News has been unable to confirm that every employee received the email but is unaware of any who did not. That’s also true of staffers who are working on Inflation Reduction Act programs for which Congress has rescinded operating budgets as part of Trump’s tax and spending megalaw.
EPA has not said what funds it is using to stay open or how long the reprieve will last, though four staff members said they expect that a broader shutdown could start next week.
Justin Chen, president of American Federation of Government Employees Council 238, the union that represents EPA staff, said the email’s reference to “exempted” staff was “confusing.”
“That’s not how the term ‘exempt’ has been used in the past in these situations,” said Chen, who added that none of his 5,000 members reported having been furloughed.
Exempted staff are usually those whose work is financed outside of the annual appropriations process — for example, with funds from the IRA or through Superfund excise taxes. Instead, EPA’s top brass seems to be applying the term to all staff, who will be paid for some unspecified number of days with left-over fiscal 2025 funds.
When EPA runs out of money it is likely to furlough all but about 10 percent of agency staff. A shutdown plan released Tuesday showed that only 1,734 employees would work through the funding lapse. That includes 828 people who are “exempt” because their positions aren’t dependent on annual appropriations and 906 staff whose work meets immediate statutory requirements or protects public safety — like EPA’s disaster response teams.
That cohort likely doesn’t include many climate staff. EPA’s climate offices are in the process of being disbanded, with team members reassigned to different work elsewhere in the agency.
White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought has said the government will soon start firing staff due to the shutdown. But it’s not clear if that will happen at EPA.
POLITICO reported last week that Administrator Lee Zeldin said during a media appearance Thursday that he aimed to shrink EPA’s workforce to 12,500 people. That’s roughly the size of the workforce EPA said it had in July after heavy departures earlier in the year.
Jeremy Symons, a senior adviser at the nonprofit Environmental Protection Network, said staffers are afraid that the administration planned to cull the agency’s workforce even further.
“The only thing we actually know is that they’ve threatened to use this time as an excuse to fire more staff, tear down more programs,” he said. “And that’s the most likely scenario.”
NOAA
The National Weather Service plans to keep issuing forecasts and warnings during the shutdown, and as of Wednesday, the agency’s social media accounts were still posting weather-related information. NWS is part of NOAA.
It looks as like Hurricane Imelda is no longer a threat to the United States, but extreme weather has struck before during a government shutdown.
That happened in 2013 when a tropical storm named Karen evolved into a nor’easter and brought heavy rainfall and floods to parts of the South and mid-Atlantic. NWS employees worked through the shutdown and issued flood warnings as the storm approached.
But not everyone at NOAA will work through the current shutdown.
Roughly 10,500 people are employed by the agency, and about half of them are exempt from furloughs, according to a Commerce Department shutdown plan. That’s because they are funded by other resources, legally required to continue working or otherwise deemed necessary for essential operations.
Fisheries monitoring and surveying activities have been suspended, according to a notice from the Department of Commerce, NOAA’s parent agency. Much of NOAA’s research will be curtailed too — though there will be some exceptions for efforts such as ocean observations necessary for weather forecasts and tsunami warnings.
NOAA’s network of agency-funded cooperative institutes — consisting of 16 science consortiums partnered with dozens of universities across the country — will continue to operate. But some may experience difficulties carrying out their regular research after losing access to NOAA-operated facilities and federal partners that they collaborate with on their projects.
FEMA
Disaster operations at the Federal Emergency Management Agency are continuing uninterrupted. Roughly 85 percent of FEMA’s 25,000 employees are considered essential, according to a government memo posted Sept. 27. On Wednesday morning, hours after the shutdown began, FEMA had 11,800 disaster workers at 16 field offices spread across the U.S.
The agency is continuing to process aid applications from individuals in counties where disasters have been declared in the past 60 days.
FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program, which provides the vast majority of flood coverage in the U.S., stopped selling and renewing policies at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday. The halt, which is not directly tied to the shutdown, stems from the expiration of NFIP’s congressional authorization Tuesday. Lawmakers had planned to extend the program through the short-term spending plan that collapsed on the same day, leading to the shutdown.
Stopping policy renewals could affect tens of thousands of households. The NFIP, which has 4.6 million policies, sees nearly 13,000 policies expire each day, assuming a steady departure rate, according to an E&E News analysis of FEMA data.
The National Association of Realtors says the shutdown could interrupt property sales, particularly in flood-prone areas. Homebuyers with federally backed mortgages are required to buy flood insurance before closing on their homes.
FEMA continues to process policyholder claims, although the Realtors association warns of potential delays. It’s uncertain what happens to policyholders whose property is flooded after their coverage has expired.
The Realtors association says it’s up to Congress to decide whether to let households renew their policies retroactively to an expiration date.
State
Employees at the State Department’s Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs will be furloughed and their activities halted, according to department guidance. So will staffers at the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs, which handles energy and minerals diplomacy.
Some employees have been exempted from the shutdown, including those whose work is related to the International Fisheries Commissions and the International Boundary and Water Commission, which enforces treaty rules between the U.S. and Mexico.
That means the U.S. might not be represented when international bodies consider big environmental issues this fall, depending on how long the shutdown drags on. That would be “a big loss,” said Kate Guy, a former senior climate official at the State Department.
The U.S. is not expected to send a delegation to the COP30 climate talks in Brazil next month, in part because the offices at State that typically participate in those negotiations were already eliminated.
There is also a host of other meetings for which U.S. participation is thrust into limbo by the shutdown. The International Maritime Organization will host a meeting of its Marine Environment Protection Committee in two weeks, and the United Nations Environment Assembly meets in December.
At the IMO, countries are expected to adopt a new set of regulations aimed at cutting climate pollution, including a tax on maritime carbon emissions. Trump administration officials have threatened countries with tariffs if they support that climate provision.
