EPA has made significant gains in staffing under President Joe Biden. President-elect Donald Trump will attempt to undo them.
When Biden came to office almost four years ago, he pledged to rebuild EPA, which had seen hundreds of employees leave due to frustration with the first Trump administration. The agency made strides in hiring more staff, flush with cash from Biden’s signature climate and infrastructure laws that boosted its workload.
As a result, more are on board at EPA. Administrator Michael Regan said in a speech this June that the agency increased its ranks by nearly 5,200 employees since his arrival.
Trump is not expected to follow suit, having pledged on the campaign trail to take apart federal agencies.
“I’m not surprised, but I am opposed,” Myron Ebell, who led Trump’s first EPA transition team, told POLITICO’s E&E News about the agency’s hiring spree. “I hope that the second Trump administration will do something about that.”
Stan Meiburg, who served as EPA acting deputy administrator during the Obama administration, said the agency has long been understaffed. It has a steady loss of personnel from retirements, transfers and turnover.
“You’re losing roughly 1,000 people a year, just if you were standing still,” Meiburg said. “They have been actively trying to hire because they have all this work to do.”
A quarterly workforce report obtained by E&E News under the Freedom of Information Act offers a snapshot of the agency’s staffing levels and how much room it has to grow.
Using its core appropriations, EPA funds about 14,336 actual full-time equivalents while its target is 15,130 FTEs, according to the report dated Aug. 20. In addition, using another funding stream from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the agency has roughly 861 actual FTEs, short of its 1,260 target.
FTEs are the hours a full-time employee works each year, which is about 2,080 work hours.
Trump won’t seek those staffing levels, judging by his history with the agency. During his earlier term, his first budget proposal sought a whopping 31 percent cut to EPA’s funding and capped employees at 11,611.
Congress, despite Republican control then, didn’t take heed. The agency had relatively level funding during Trump’s last presidency.
“You can see how much protection federal civil servants have, even with Republican members of Congress who are supposedly budget cutters,” said Ebell, now chair of the American Lands Council.
After this story was published, EPA shared staffing figures, showing the agency’s workforce is larger when including temporary personnel and those backed by other funding streams.
EPA has 16,056 current full-time permanent and temporary employees, according to EPA spokesperson Andrea Drinkard. Those staffers are funded by base appropriations as well as the climate and infrastructure laws.
In addition, the agency’s hiring spree has continued since Regan’s speech in June.
As of today, EPA has hired 6,232 current full-time permanent and temporary employees since the beginning of the Biden administration.
Buyouts and Schedule F
EPA staffers are worried about Trump’s return, considering how difficult times were during his last administration.
The agency could face a wave of retirements among its aging workforce, with some are already planning to leave. That could give Trump an opportunity to downsize EPA’s staff.
“People will say, ‘I’m disgusted with what Trump wants to do and I’m leaving. I don’t want to have anything to do with it.’ And then you don’t replace them,” Ebell said.
The president-elect could try another method his administration applied during its first go-around.
In 2017, EPA sought to reduce staff by 1,227 positions by offering buyouts. The effort fell short though as only 362 employees took the offers.
Trump could try to reclassify career staffers, making them easier to fire. He has promised to revive his executive order that created Schedule F, a new class of civil servant that is essentially at will.
Agencies had just begun to identify employees who could be Schedule F before Trump left office last time. Documents show EPA found 579 positions that fit into the category.
Biden revoked the order and finalized a rule to block its return. Trump will have to start a new rulemaking process, which will take time, to repeal that rule.
“The idea behind Schedule F is absolutely necessary if we’re going to get control of the federal bureaucracy,” Ebell said. “It’s going to take a while to actually implement it because there will be all kinds of challenges to it.”
The Project 2025 plan for EPA, organized by the conservative Heritage Foundation, would likely reduce the agency’s staffing. The proposal would eliminate a special hiring authority to bring on scientists, terminate new hires in “low-value programs” and relocate Senior Executive Service positions, among other moves.
EPA funding cuts
Trump has said he will claw back funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, which could affect EPA since it has received $41.5 billion from the law.
Ebell also advised Trump to submit “a major budget cut proposal” to Capitol Hill and push it with lawmakers. He thinks the president-elect might have more success this time.
“I think there will be a much stronger focus on budget cutting, both from the Trump administration and from the Speaker’s Office,” Ebell said. “Now in the Senate, God only knows.”
A smaller budget would draw down EPA staffing. The Trump administration might then have to use a “reduction in force,” which are staff layoffs.
That could prove troublesome to Trump’s deregulatory efforts. He has pledged to cut 10 rules for every new one issued, which would have a huge impact on a major regulator like EPA.
“The reduction in force is so disruptive that simply executing it would pretty much grind the agency to a halt,” said Meiburg, now executive director for Wake Forest University’s Andrew Sabin Family Center for Environment and Sustainability. “If there is, in fact, a policy agenda that the administration would like to pursue, creating that much disruption, the organization is not going to advance that agenda.”
