EPA supporters rallied in March to protest the agency’s retreat from environmental protection. Policy “pillars” now include “Restore Energy Dominance” and “Make the United States the Artificial Intelligence Capital of the World.” | Photo by Mark Bialek
The Trump administration’s plan to slash payments on research grants has put thousands of U-M jobs at risk. But other local researchers are in even more immediate jeopardy: those who work directly for the federal government, at the EPA or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL).
Related: Research at Risk
The employee—who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation—points out that of the five policy “pillars” announced by new EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, only one involves protecting the environment. Others include “Restore American Energy Dominance” and “Make the United States the Artificial Intelligence Capital of the World.”
On March 11, which Zeldin called “the most consequential day of deregulation in American history,” the administrator announced thirty-one policy changes. They included “reconsideration” of current limits on aerial emissions of mercury and small particulates, and wastewater discharges from oil and gas development. Even more consequentially, he intends to reverse the EPA’s 2009 endangerment finding that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere “endanger both the public health and the environment for current and future generations.” That finding underlies emission limits on greenhouse gases, including new vehicle standards that were developed in Ann Arbor and were scheduled to take effect in the 2026 model year.
“By overhauling massive rules on the endangerment finding, the social cost of carbon and similar issues,” Zeldin wrote on the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page, “we are driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion and ushering in America’s Golden Age.”
“Trump’s attack on ‘climate change’ through these rollbacks put all of [the] good work done [at] this lab at risk,” responds Tricia Paff, president of the American Federation of Government Employees local union. Greenhouse gases, she emails, “play a major role in warming our planet and fueling wild climate extremes. … Climate change is not a hoax. In 2023 in Florida, extreme heat resulted in 46 days with heat index over 100 degrees. The seawater temperature rose so high that it was unsafe for humans to swim. … The Trump Administration can fire scientists and try to remove the words ‘climate change’ from EPA websites, policies, and contracts, [but] these actions will not protect Americans from intensifying climate extremes.”
“The idea that any of this improves efficiency is just crazy,” says the unnamed EPA staffer. The weekly bullet-point reports demanded by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, they add, “are just as crazy. … They’re judging us without any understanding of our work or context. I could write a bullet of what I did that would make perfect sense to my boss [but it won’t] make any sense to anybody else.”
The emissions standards Zeldin targeted took years to develop. Our source says their colleagues consulted vehicle and engine makers to create rules that would limit greenhouse gas emissions “in a way that is efficient and effective.” A cost-benefit analysis found they would “save money in terms of [reduced] harm to human health and the environment.”
They find it “discouraging to think that all that hard and careful work is going to be thrown out”—and add that “to some extent,” demoralizing EPA workers seems to be part of the administration’s plan.
The federal workers who talked to the Observer describe their work in idealistic terms. “Despite taking a significant cut in pay and leave time to work at EPA, I still jumped at the opportunity,” emails an engineer who came from the auto industry. “I wanted to help protect our clean air. Serving my fellow Americans in this way is such meaningful work to me. I hope to keep contributing here as long as I can.”
Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, in contrast, describes the agency’s work as destructive and its employees as enemies to be subdued. The EPA staffer shared a link to an article last fall in Government Executive about Russell Vought, who describes himself as a Christian nationalist and leader of the Project 2025 plan for Trump’s return to power. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said at a conference organized by a think tank he headed between Trump’s terms. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.”
The senate nonetheless confirmed Vought’s appointment on a party-line vote. “It was disgusting to see 53 Republican Senators vote against the best interest of their constituents (and the country) by voting against federal workers and the services they provide to the public FOR THE PEOPLE,” writes Paff, the local union president. “Nobody voted for dirty air or dirty water, or to eviscerate the VA or the Social Security Administration.”
Presumably no one voted to fire the people tracking toxic algal blooms in Lake Erie either, but according to a staffer, that’s what happened at GLERL.
After Toledo was forced to shut down its drinking water intake for three days in 2014, this person says, “NOAA created this really robust research program to research and monitor these harmful algal blooms, and there’s been a lot of progress over the last decade with monitoring it and keeping the drinking water safe to make sure that doesn’t happen again.
“But a lot of the people that worked on that, including the leader of that entire branch, [were] fired. So it will seriously impact our ability to monitor those toxins in the water and possibly lead to the drinking water being compromised. It’s really scary.”
David Wright, president of the lab’s AFGE local, emails that eight probationary employees were fired in DOGE’s purge of new hires throughout the federal system. Though a court overturned that action, the employees were then placed on administrative leave. “In total, with people taking the deferred resignation and already planned retirements, we are down about 20 percent of our workforce with a hiring freeze still in place,” he writes.
The EPA engineer sees the retreat from environmental protection in dire terms: “Regardless of my personal fate, all of our lives depend on this agency’s continued existence.”
