EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has heralded a downsizing to Reagan-era staffing levels, but the growth in the agency’s workload in the last four decades poses pressing questions about its ability to keep up — and whether the Trump administration even intends to try.
When President Ronald Reagan left the White House in January 1989, EPA was less than two decades old, and many laws and regulations now central to its mission had yet to be put on paper.
The agency was far from confronting the threat of “forever chemicals” nor had it tackled the perils of acid rain and was just beginning to take stock of the potentially catastrophic effects of a thinning stratospheric ozone layer.
Those latter two programs sprang from the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, which also dramatically expanded the list of pollutants EPA had to regulate because they were harmful to people’s health.
“Do you know how many hazardous air pollutants there were in the 1980s? Four,” said David Doniger, a senior attorney and strategist with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “And in the 1990 Clean Air Act, Congress listed 187.”
Doniger, who worked at EPA in the late 1990s, said the amendments also boosted the industries EPA was compelled to regulate from a handful to dozens.
Reagan’s EPA also didn’t regulate climate pollution. The first global climate agreement was reached in 1992, and the agency didn’t begin setting standards for pollutants like carbon dioxide and methane until former President Barack Obama’s second term, two decades later.
Each new program added to the agency’s workload, which in turn increased the number of employees needed to conduct analyses, craft rules, issue permits and meet deadlines set by Congress.
And lately, EPA staffers have strained to keep up with lawmakers’ renewed gusto for the earmarked pet projects often dubbed “pork.”
‘Trying to run the agency down’
Even before Zeldin unveiled his agency restructuring plan last week, EPA has been hard-pressed to handle all its congressionally assigned chores, no matter who’s in the White House.
During Obama’s tenure, for example, it took a string of lawsuits brought by environmental groups to force the agency to belatedly launch updates to hazardous air pollutant standards for industries ranging from boat builders to steelmakers.
Perhaps the biggest winner under Zeldin’s plan so far would be EPA’s chemicals office, which would gain experts to help whittle away a backlog of new products needing reviews before going on the market. New positions in the air and water offices have also been listed on EPA’s internal job board.
Overall, however, EPA operations are certain to shrink as the White House seeks to slash the agency’s budget by more than half for the fiscal year that begins in October.
“For years, it’s been defending being late on things by saying, ‘Well, Congress has not given us enough money or people,’” said Doniger. “And here you have the Trump administration trying to run the agency down well below the levels of money appropriated by Congress.”
Zeldin frames the planned overhaul as an effort to refocus EPA’s work on its statutory responsibilities, a reading that appears to largely exclude attempts to address the spiraling menace posed by climate change.
While greenhouse gas emissions aren’t explicitly listed in the Clean Air Act and its amendments, the Supreme Court has ruled that six gases meet the statute’s definition as pollutants and EPA in 2009 determined that they endanger public health and welfare. That finding, which forms the basis of EPA’s climate rules, is now being reconsidered.
What is the right number?
In announcing the initial phase of the restructuring last week, Zeldin said it would save more than $300 million next year as part of a broader retrenchment expected to result in “employment levels near those” of Reagan’s tenure. Exactly what that means, however, is murky.
As POLITICO’s E&E News has previously reported, the ranks of EPA employees fluctuated widely and actually grew during Reagan’s eight-year tenure, from a low of about 10,800 in fiscal 1983 to a high of roughly 14,400 in fiscal 1988.
That latter figure is close to the most recent available total for EPA’s core workforce of 14,733, according to agency records for the first fiscal quarter of 2025 obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Asked Tuesday what the EPA boss thinks is the right number, spokesperson Molly Vaseliou reiterated another Zeldin statement that says the reorganization “will bring much needed efficiencies to incorporate science into our rulemakings and sharply focus our work on providing the cleanest air, land, and water.”
Vaseliou also did not address queries seeking Zeldin’s rationale for believing that decades-old workforce levels — when both the United States’ population and gross domestic product were well below today’s totals — are now appropriate in light of EPA’s added responsibilities.
To critics, such questions are beside the point. They view the entire restructuring plan as a bad-faith exercise aimed at gutting the agency’s ability to protect human health and the environment.
“I’m not sure what problem they’re trying to solve by doing this, other than the desire to just disrupt, to keep people from doing research and, wanting to de-emphasize the role of science,” said Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta, who retired in 2021 as the principal deputy assistant administrator in the Office of Research and Development.
‘New responsibilities’ for the water program
Congress has amended the Clean Water Act twice and the Safe Drinking Water Act seven times since 1985, adding to the workload in EPA’s water office.
EPA’s program for cleaning up estuaries, for example, wasn’t created until 1987. In addition, a major federal credit program for water infrastructure projects, WIFIA, was established by the Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act in 2014.
WIFIA has been popular among lawmakers and local officials, but it takes EPA staff to process loan applications and ensure funding gets out the door, said Mae Wu, who was deputy assistant administrator for water under the Biden administration.
“For a lot of water systems that can’t get grants, this low-interest loan is how they’re able to update their treatment plant, their water infrastructure, or all their leaking pipes,” Wu said.
During the Reagan administration, the water sector wasn’t facing the same challenges as today, such as “forever chemicals” and cybersecurity threats.
Notably, Zeldin’s reorganization plan included a pledge to boost the water office’s focus on cybersecurity. But it would also eliminate the Office of Science and Technology, a division within the water office that sets limits for industrial discharges of dangerous pollutants and toxic chemicals.
Under Reagan, EPA mostly focused on controlling specific “point sources” of pollution, said Betsy Southerland, a former longtime career staffer. It wasn’t until the 1990s that the agency expanded its focus on stormwater runoff and set technology-based pollution standards for various industries, Southerland said.
While it’s unclear how the reorganization could affect staffing levels in the water office, returning staff to Reagan-era levels would be “totally inadequate,” said Southerland, who retired in 2017.
“It would certainly make them prone to litigation, because they’re going to miss a lot of deadlines on these new responsibilities if they cut the staff back,” she said.
Southerland is also worried about eliminating the water program’s Office of Science and Technology, which she previously led. The office develops health advisories for pollutants in waterways that can be detrimental to human health.
“They don’t want to have a scientist focused in a single area where they can really build their expertise and ensure the highest quality risk assessments,” Southerland said of the Trump EPA. “So they’re taking the scientists concentrated in the Office of Science and Technology and putting them in other offices.”
Other water office divisions have also been given more responsibilities in recent years by Congress.
Lawmakers have approved hundreds of earmarks for upgrades to drinking water and wastewater plants, for example. But EPA has struggled to process those earmarks and get the funding out the door, as staffing hasn’t kept up with demand, former career staffers say.
‘Proactive or reactive?’
Zeldin plans to reassign at least 100 staffers from the research office to help expedite reviews in the New Chemicals Division, which has struggled to keep up with the pace.
EPA wasn’t required to approve new chemicals before they entered the market until 2016, when Congress passed sweeping amendments to the Toxic Substances Control Act. The agency had the option to evaluate new chemicals for safety under the original 1976 law, but the new amendments mandated assessors complete reviews within 90 days or 180 days if extended.
Approximately 500 chemical applications await review, a backlog that industry lobbying groups such as the American Chemistry Council complain is hindering U.S. manufacturing.
Chris Jahn, president and CEO of the council, has said the answer lies with creating a more efficient process. Zeldin’s move to juice the program with additional staffers grants wishes — at least in part — from agency staffers who for years have been swamped with too few resources and far more responsibilities under the revamped TSCA.
How much money Congress will direct to TSCA is unclear, but its latest spending package provided $17 million for new tech updates to its notoriously clunky chemical data dashboard.
Regarding polluted sites, the Reagan administration was the first to implement the 1980 Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act — better known as Superfund.
The first Trump administration prioritized Superfund cleanups, and Zeldin has signaled he intends to follow suit. In recent media appearances, Zeldin has said he wants every dollar EPA spends to go “directly towards remediating the environmental issue that needs attention.”
EPA’s Office of Land and Emergency Management is among seven other program offices still awaiting reorganization plans. The office houses Superfund as well as the brownfields program, established in 1995 to help clean up dilapidated former industrial sites.
Orme-Zavaleta said Zeldin’s push to bring EPA “back to the basics” misses what its mission has evolved into: preventative measures.
“If you look at the whole evolution of the agency, the early focus very much was, command and control … that evolved into a lot of focus on risk,” she said. “It’s a matter of, do you want to be proactive or reactive? Remediation is reactive. So you’re not fixing the problem. You’re just cleaning up the spill after it’s already happened.”
An ‘extinction event’ for climate?
In the final year of Reagan’s presidency, James Hansen, then the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told a Senate committee that the “greenhouse effect” was already affecting the global climate.
A few years later, the U.S. became a party to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. That treaty, which was approved by the Senate, obligates the U.S. to join other rich nations in reporting climate emissions annually to the United Nations. EPA submitted that inventory every year from the late 1990s until this year.
EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation is responsible for most of EPA’s climate work. It writes rules; runs voluntary emissions abatement programs; and oversees programs to quantify emissions, including the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, to which 8,000 high-emitting facilities report each year, and the annual inventory of emissions and sinks.
But the Trump EPA has thrown many of those programs on the chopping block. EPA’s plans for the 2009 endangerment finding could end its climate regulatory program, except for climate-forcing hydroflurocarbons that are regulated under a 2020 law. And, as E&E News reported Monday, EPA plans to eliminate Energy Star, a decades-old appliance efficiency program.
The reorganization plan reflects the Trump administration’s goal of getting out of the climate mitigation business almost entirely. The agency’s Office of Atmospheric Protection, which houses those programs, would be scrapped with no clear plan for who would handle that work. It has about 300 employees involved in climate issues, and their former colleagues say they’re bracing for job cuts tied to Friday’s announcement.
One former OAR official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters said the reorganization was like “an extinction event” for climate work at the agency.
But in a video posted to EPA’s website, Zeldin touted the administration’s accomplishments thus far as “just the beginning.”
“We have four more years of victories ahead of us,” he said, “and EPA is proud to do its part to power the great American comeback and ensure a cleaner planet for future generations.”
Sean Reilly can be reached on Signal at SeanReilly.70. Ellie Borst can be reached on Signal at eborst.64. Miranda Willson can be reached on Signal at mirandawillson.99. Jean Chemnick can be reached on Signal at jchemnick.01.
Reporter Kevin Bogardus contributed.
