Next agency to slash 65% of its workforce revealed
President Donald Trump announced on Wednesday that his Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin will cut a majority of that agency's workforce. 'I spoke to Lee Zeldin and he thinks he's going to be cutting 65 or so percent of the people from environmental and we're going to speed up the process too,' Trump said at his first Cabinet meeting. 'A lot of people that weren't doing their job, were just obstructionists, a lot of people that didn't exist,' he added.
Trump, along with his head of DOGE Elon Musk , has been on a kick to cut the federal workforce and reshape the role of government. Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX , was at Wednesday's Cabinet meeting and Trump has praised him for his efforts and encouraged him to take it even further. The EPA employs around 17,000 people, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Its budget is $12.083 billion.
The staff consist of engineers, scientists, environmental protection specialists, legal, public affairs, financial, and information technologists. The agency is tasked with cleaning up air, land and water pollution. It also funds scientific research through grants, including Joe Biden's Cancer Moonshot Initiative.
And the agency operates the Superfund trust fund, which is financed by petroleum excise taxes, chemical feedstock excise taxes, and environmental income taxes. The fund identify parties responsible for hazardous substances released and either compels them to clean up the sites or to pay back the Superfund for doing so. The president also said Wednesday that federal employees who have not responded to Musk's email asking for them to outline five duties they have performed in a week 'are on the bubble.'
Musk, who spoke before any member of Trump's Cabinet, said that he had Trump's permission to send the email. Some agencies directed employees not to answer it given the sensitive nature of their jobs. 'Those million people that haven't responded though, Elon, they are on the bubble,' Trump said. 'I wouldn't say that we're thrilled about it, they haven't responded.'
'Those people are on the bubble as they say, maybe they're gonna be gone,' he added. Musk said he could send another email, which Trump called a 'good idea.' The White House said on Tuesday that more than 1 million federal employees had responded to Musk's email, which is about half of the full federal workforce.
Meanwhile, Zeldin is encouraging the White House to strike down a scientific finding that is behind much of the federal government's push to combat climate change, The Washington Post reported. The 2009 'endangerment finding' - which found that planet-warming gases were a public health threat - allowed the regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.
The Obama and Biden administrations used the finding to set strict limits on emissions. EPA officials weighed whether to reverse the endangerment finding during Trump's first administration but opted not to do so. Trump, on his first day in office in his second term, signed an executive order tasking the agency to review the 'endangerment finding.'
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