Employees Kept in the Dark as EPA Dismantles Scientific Research Office – Mother Jones

The entrance to the Environmental Protection Agency headquarters in Washington, DC. Aaron Schwartz/Sipa USA/AP

This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Employees of the crucial scientific research arm of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have been left with more questions than answers as the agency moves to officially wind down the office following months of back-and-forth.

On Friday evening, the EPA issued a press release announcing a reduction in force at the Office of Research and Development, citing the move as part of a larger effort to save a purported $749 million. On Monday, some employees at ORD, the largest office in the agency, began receiving emails saying that they’d been assigned new positions within the EPA.

“Please note, this is not an offer, but a notice of reassignment,” says a letter sent to an employee and viewed by WIRED. The employee had previously applied to positions within the agency, as ORD employees were instructed to do in May. “There is no action you need to take to accept the reassignment, and there is no option to decline.”

On a call with ORD administrators and staff held Monday afternoon, audio of which was obtained by WIRED, leadership—including ORD acting administrator Maureen Gwinn—was unable to answer basic questions from employees, including a timeline for when the agency planned to permanently end ORD, how many employees would be transferred to other offices, and how many would lose their jobs.

Employees at ORD who spoke with WIRED say that Friday’s public-facing email was the first concrete news they had heard about their organization’s future. One worker told WIRED that employees often learned more from news outlets, including WIRED, “than we do from our management.”

“We wish we had more information for you,” Gwinn told staff on the call. “I’ll speak for myself, I wish we weren’t at this point today.”

An EPA spokesperson, who declined to give their name, wrote in response to a series of questions from WIRED that the agency is currently offering its third voluntary resignation period, known as a DRP, which ends on July 25. “The [reduction in force] process entails a number of specific procedures in accordance with OPM regulations,” they said. “The next step in this process is to issue intent to RIF notices to individual employees.”

That number “won’t be clear,” they said, until after the DRP process was over.

“This is not an elimination of science and research,” the spokesperson wrote. “We are confident EPA has the resources needed to accomplish the agency’s core mission of protecting human health and the environment, fulfill all statutory obligations, and make the best-informed decisions based on the gold standard of science.”

At the start of the year, ORD was composed of between 1,000 and 2,000 scientists at labs spread across the country as well as in Washington, DC. The branch’s work provides much of the science that underpins the policy formed in the agency, from research on chemicals’ impacts on human health and the environment to air quality and climate change to planning for emergencies and responding to contamination in air, soil, and water. The office contains many groups and initiatives that are crucial to protecting the environment and human health, including a team that studies human health risks from chemicals.

Several EPA scientists stressed to WIRED that ORD’s current structure, which allows research to happen independent of the policy-making that occurs in other parts of the agency, is crucial to producing quality work. One told WIRED that they worked in a scientific role in an EPA policy office under the first Trump administration. There, they felt that their job was to “try and mine the science to support a policy decision that had already been made.” The structure at ORD, they said, provides a layer of insulation between decisionmakers and the scientific process.

ORD was heavily singled out in Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership document, the policy blueprint that has closely anticipated the Trump administration’s moves in office. It described the branch as “precautionary, bloated, unaccountable, closed, outcome-driven, hostile to public and legislative input, and inclined to pursue political rather than purely scientific goals.”

The plan did not, however, propose doing away with the organization. But in March, documents presented to the White House by agency leadership proposed dissolving ORD, resulting in backlash from Democrats in Congress.

In early May, the EPA announced it would be reorganizing its structure, which administrator Lee Zeldin wrote in a Newsweek op-ed would “improve” the agency by “integrating scientific staff directly into our program offices.” The agency said that it would create a new Office of Applied Science and Environmental Solutions, which would sit under the Office of the Administrator.

Putting much of ORD’s scientific work in policy offices, the scientist who previously worked in a policy office told WIRED, means that “we’re going to end up seeing science that has been unduly influenced by policy interests. I don’t think that’s going to result in policy decisions that are empirically supportable.”

Following May’s reorganization announcement, ORD employees were encouraged to apply for jobs within other parts of the agency. Multiple workers who spoke with WIRED say the job postings for these new positions were bare-bones, with little description of what the work would actually entail. One job posting seen by WIRED labels the role simply as “Interdisciplinary Scientific & Engineering Positions,” with no information about the topic area, team, or scientific expertise required.

The EPA’s reorganization efforts were temporarily stalled by lawsuits. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court paused a preliminary injunction blocking further mass reductions in force at 17 federal agencies, including the EPA.

There was one bright spot on Monday’s call: ORD leadership told employees that all of the ORD-affiliated labs would be kept open, a piece of news that ran contrary to some previous reports. Still, workers say that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to do science at the EPA. More than 325 ORD workers—around a fifth of ORD’s ranks—had taken voluntary retirements since the start of the year, according to the EPA spokesperson.

A scientist told WIRED that while they usually would have had a small team helping with their field work, they’ve been left to handle everything alone, including “washing dishes and labeling bottles.” Cumbersome new financial approval processes, they said, have also resulted in chemicals that they ordered being delayed for months and expensive equipment sitting without any repairs.

Since taking office, Zeldin has made it clear that he intends to relax environmental regulations, especially those affecting business. Last week, he authored an op-ed in Fox News advertising how the agency would essentially erase the Clean Air Act permitting process for power plants and data centers in order to “make America the AI capital of the world.” ORD scientists fear that the dissolution of their office will only make this pro-business mission easier.

“If you’re going to end up rolling back air quality regulations—and we know, conclusively at this point, that ozone pollution is causing premature mortality and chronic effects—if you roll back the rules, you’re going to see excess cases of death and illness,” one scientist tells WIRED. “My guess is that [EPA leadership] don’t want to know the answer to the question of how bad it is going to be.”