The Trump administration has squelched both external and internal oversight of EPA’s deregulatory agenda with moves that silence forums for critics, among other impacts, a review by POLITICO’s E&E News has found.
The erosion of scrutiny over the agency’s unparalleled and aggressive wave of environmental rollbacks has happened largely under the radar and with less fanfare than its blockbuster deregulatory announcements.
Take the firing of EPA’s in-house watchdog, along with ousting — and thus far not replacing — members of an advisory committee that has the authority to study the scientific basis for proposed rollbacks.
Outright abolished are other advisory panels that could have afforded critics a setting to publicly probe two of Administrator Lee Zeldin’s key objectives: a wholesale retreat from air pollution regulations strengthened during President Joe Biden’s term and the dismantling of EPA’s office to combat disproportionate pollution exposure under the umbrella of environmental justice.
Data, too, has been wiped. No longer does EPA provide quarterly updates on emissions from individual coal-fired power plants even as the White House seeks to loosen regulation on a still major source of air pollution. Last year, possibly for the first time in a half-century, the agency failed to publish its annual Air Quality Trends report, which provides a broader snapshot of pollution levels across the United States.
As the Republican-controlled Congress aloofly stands by, “what we are seeing today is unprecedented,” said Stan Meiburg, a retired EPA career employee who served as the agency’s acting deputy administrator under President Barack Obama.
In response to written questions, EPA press secretary Carolyn Holran offered a broad defense of the current administration’s record, saying that President Donald Trump’s 2024 election encompassed a mandate to cut government bureaucracy and programs tied to “diversity, equity and inclusion.”
The administration still intends to release the air trends report, Holran added, as she attributed the delay to last fall’s government shutdown.
“The Trump EPA has and will continue to be 100% committed to fulfilling our core mission of protecting human health and the environment and ensuring clean air for all Americans,” she said
Meanwhile, a worker advocacy group’s bid to redress allegedly illegal treatment of some EPA staff is languishing.
In a complaint filed last April, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility accused EPA of violating federal law by idling some workers indefinitely because of their purported connection to environmental justice work. The group asked the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, an independent agency charged with upholding civil service protections, to investigate and intervene.
Nine months later, the complaint has gone “absolutely nowhere,” PEER staff counsel Laura Dumais said in an interview. “It’s been extremely frustrating.” After Trump fired the Biden-era appointee who headed the Office of Special Counsel, it is now led by acting chief Jamieson Greer, who is also U.S. trade representative.
“I don’t think this administration wants them [complaints] to be pursued in a timely manner,” Dumais said.
A representative of the special counsel’s office had no comment.
EPA watchdog vacancy
As oversight has faltered, so have EPA’s staffing levels during this Trump administration.
More than 2,300 employees have separated from the agency since Trump’s second inauguration last year while EPA’s headcount has dipped below 15,000 for fiscal 2026, according to workforce data as of November compiled by the Office of Personnel Management. That figure is expected to decline further, dropping to about 12,500 staffers by the end of this fiscal year.
Trump had been in office less than a week when he included then-EPA Inspector General Sean O’Donnell in a purge of IGs across the federal government.
No replacement has yet been nominated. Holding the job on an acting basis is Nicole Murley, who was deputy IG under O’Donnell and joined the EPA watchdog office in 2021 after serving as a Justice Department attorney.
In a tumultuous year also marked by billions of dollars in canceled grants, the gutting of EPA’s research branch and a historic restructuring in its air office, the inspector general’s office focused its work on mundane assignments and ongoing reviews of initiatives launched during Biden’s tenure, according to materials posted on its website.
“I haven’t seen any major fraud cases go public, yet, and I haven’t seen a lot of big audits published,” said O’Donnell, now working for Judicial Watch, a conservative advocacy and research group, in an interview.
O’Donnell also noted that the inspector general’s website showed that an audit critical of EPA’s financial management was released on New Year’s Eve, when it was unlikely to garner news media attention.
In an email exchange, Kim Wheeler, a spokesperson for the inspector general’s office, said its work is not tied to agency actions based on political leadership, but “driven by our mission to detect and deter waste” and promote efficiency.
The audit, Wheeler added after this story was published, was part of EPA’s annual financial report submitted to the White House Office of Management and Budget on Dec. 31 after a shutdown-related delay. The inspector general’s office, following standard practice, then actually posted the audit to its website on Jan. 2, she said.
Bye-bye ‘bully pulpit’
As part of a long-standing practice, Wheeler added, the IG’s office also does not launch projects into matters “that are the subject of ongoing litigation,” a category that would encompass at least some of the administration’s most contested moves.
Only days after Trump fired O’Donnell, his appointees at EPA engineered the dismissal of all members of the agency’s Science Advisory Board, created by Congress to furnish outside expertise to the agency on a range of technical and scientific topics.
Zeldin similarly has yet to name any replacements, despite having sought nominations last spring.
In response to queries in recent months, EPA press aides have said only that review of the nominees is continuing, without offering a fuller explanation for the slow pace or a timetable for appointing new members.
Whatever the reasons for Zeldin’s inaction, it has the effect of sidelining a panel that was sharply critical of EPA’s handling of top priorities during Trump’s first term. While the SAB typically examines topics at the agency’s request, members also have the authority to assess “the adequacy and scientific basis” of planned regulations and then issue written findings, according to the board’s charter.
“The SAB is kind of a bully pulpit in that it puts out these reports that are public reports,” said Richard Smith, a statistics professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who served on the board during both Trump’s first term and later under Biden.
The panel has historically been made up mostly of university-based researchers. During Trump’s prior term, a shake-up in membership policies tilted the board toward more representation of industry and state government interests.
To the surprise of some observers, it nonetheless singled out major shortcomings in the science underpinning high-profile initiatives to weaken vehicle emissions standards and limit Clean Water Act protections, among others.
During Trump’s second term, EPA is now chasing similar goals, along with repealing the greenhouse gas endangerment finding that undergirds climate regulations. Asked whether the board could provide comparable scrutiny if it were still active, Smith replied: “I would certainly hope so.”
Permanently scrapped are the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council and the Clean Air Act Advisory Committee. The first was axed in response to a White House directive that called for the elimination of “unnecessary” panels.
The latter, created to help with implementation of the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments, was chaired by the head of EPA’s air office, who would thus have to appear in public once or twice a year and field questions from committee members.
Since winning Senate confirmation for the position in July, current air chief Aaron Szabo has spoken at closed-door gatherings but not appeared at any open events apart from online public hearings, his official calendar indicates.
As was true during Trump’s first term, EPA is seeking to prop up the coal-fired power sector. No longer updated, however, are the online spreadsheets that provided a wealth of information every three months on individual plants’ releases of sulfur dioxide and other dangerous pollutants.
Midway through that previous term, those numbers showed ballooning emissions at some plants. After Trump returned to office last year, EPA without explanation stopped adding new data to the spreadsheets. While the information can still be extracted from an online clearinghouse, it is no longer readily visible to the public.
Other EPA reports remain missing, such as a roundup of annual enforcement statistics that could show a plummeting crackdown on polluters, as critics had predicted. An EPA spokesperson told E&E News last week that the agency anticipates the report will be released soon.
The annual Air Quality Trends report is an EPA fixture dating back to 1973, said Chet Wayland, who headed EPA’s air assessment division before his 2024 retirement and believed that it had previously come out every year since.
The holdup in release of the most recent edition is puzzling because the report “has always been a positive story” as air quality improves, Wayland added. While the delayed report would cover 2024, the last full year of Biden’s term, future versions could reflect the impact of Trump administration policies.
In her email, Holran, the EPA spokesperson, offered no explanation for the continued lag more than two months after the government shutdown ended. The agency, she said, understands the report’s important role in providing transparency to the public and is working expeditiously to get it “published in the near future.”
Reach this reporter on Signal at SeanReilly.70.
Kevin Bogardus contributed to this report.
