Trump’s EPA Plans to Gut Research. What that Means for Clean Air and Water Rules

CLIMATEWIRE | If EPA amputates its scientific arm, it would have consequences for environmental regulations for years to come, experts said.

Administrator Lee Zeldin’s proposal to eliminate the Office of Research and Development — and fire hundreds of scientists — threatens to drain the agency of experts who ensure that federal rules accurately target pollution and provide remedies. The move, if approved by the White House, could also lead the agency to depend on outside researchers who risk being selected through a politicized process that jeopardizes EPA’s mission of assessing regulations without prejudice, according to experts.

Reverberations from gutting the research office, known as ORD, could affect the agency long past the end of President Donald Trump’s second term.

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“ORD is a crown jewel of EPA, and it provides indispensable scientific information that forms the underpinnings of a lot of regulatory decisions,” said Richard Revesz, who headed the White House regulatory office during the Biden administration.

Signs of the purge could be delayed, he said, because the Trump administration is unlikely to prioritize regulations.

“It will make it difficult for an administration that comes in committed to carrying out EPA’s actual mission to have the scientific underpinnings necessary to move forward with the kind of regulatory program they might otherwise be able to have,” Revesz said.

The agency’s leaked workforce reduction plan, first reported in The New York Times on Tuesday, calls for EPA to eliminate 1,540 scientists as part of a broader effort to slash 65 percent of the agency’s budget. The plan would keep a relatively small number of scientists who it said are “directly supporting statutory work.” They would be reshuffled into other offices.

The reductions would fall heavily on EPA offices in North Carolina and elsewhere around the country, where its labs are concentrated.

The sudden loss of so much expertise might make it harder for EPA to fulfill its core mission of regulating air and water pollution based on “the best available science” — as it is required to do under bedrock laws like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, experts said.

“EPA’s mission is to protect human health and the environment,” said Laura Kate Bender, assistant vice president of nationwide healthy air at the American Lung Association. “They can’t do that if they don’t have the facts on how air pollution impacts human health and the environment.”

For example, the Clean Air Act directs EPA to set maximum allowable limits for harmful air pollutants — dubbed the National Ambient Air Quality Standards, or NAAQS — at levels that are deemed by years of research to be safe for the public. That science is conducted at the office Zeldin has proposed to eliminate.

EPA itself points to the importance of conducting that research without bias — which could lead to standards that are influenced by environmentalists or industry. The agency’s website states that placing the NAAQS process within the science office “ensures that the assessments can be developed independent of their use by EPA’s program and regional offices to set national standards and make environmental decisions.”

Chet Wayland, a longtime EPA career official who recently retired as head of air quality monitoring, said the full effect of the layoffs may not be felt until EPA’s current models and monitoring tools become obsolete through years of deferred research.

“Nobody’s doing the research for solving the future problems,” Wayland said, referring to a scenario under Zeldin’s plan. “We’re having to rely on current tools for future problems. And we know that things change over time, and you constantly need to upgrade those tools. And ORD was a major part of providing those updates for us on a regular basis.”

Revesz said climate science might not be the hardest hit, because most of it was conducted outside of EPA. But agency research is often at the vanguard of finding new public health hazards that may require regulation.

Thomas Lorenzen, a former Justice Department attorney who defended EPA regulations in court, said it was unclear whether the loss of so much scientific expertise would lead to more rules being overturned in court. While EPA is supposed to base its rulemakings on the best available science, he said, “there’s nothing that says that EPA has to rely on their own internal science to justify their decisions.”

“So, what you’ve got here is basically the outsourcing of science,” Lorenzen said. “And that could give rise to questions. Is that science unbiased? Who funds it? Where does it come from?”

Lorenzen said EPA would need to explain why it chose the science and analysis it relied on when undertaking a rulemaking.

“So, it could make things more challenging, but it doesn’t have to,” he said. Courts generally defer to agencies in their areas of expertise, he said.

But Georges Benjamin, executive director of American Public Health Association, said EPA would need scientists to vet outside research and fill in any gaps.

“When you’re doing [research] for regulatory oversight, you have to be very careful you don’t bring bias into that,” he said. “And this office is essential to doing good regulatory oversight. So, I think it will be a real problem. And maybe that is the administration’s intent, is to bring regulatory oversight to a halt.”

Meredith Hankins, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said losing internal expertise means EPA would have to rely on science that is conducted outside of government transparency laws. But it also means losing a generation of career scientists who would leave government service over the next four years and won’t train their eventual replacements.

“So, it’s not just the hiring and firing of individual people, but it’s the years and years of knowledge and expertise that really cannot be replaced,” she said.

Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2025. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.