EPA employees are shuffling to “safer” agencies. An Interior Department worker is putting off buying a new car and poring over Project 2025. And civil servants across the government are worried they might soon get fired.
Federal employees throughout the executive branch are panicking at the thought of another Trump administration.
Former President Donald Trump has pledged to “demolish the deep state.” His running mate, Ohio Republican Sen. JD Vance, has said Trump ought to fire “every civil servant in the administrative state.” It’s not just campaign-trail bluster. In the waning days of his first administration, Trump sought to make it easier to fire federal employees — a move that was quickly reversed by the Biden administration.
Workers in some agencies are particularly distraught about a possible Trump return. The former president and his allies have singled out certain agencies — including those that issue environmental rules — as prime targets, should he return to office in January.
Climate, clean energy and conservation programs scaled up and burnished with cash during the Biden administration are certain to be lightning rods for Trump and his team. That’s looming large over energy and environmental workers, who are feeling the pressure on a professional level as they’re hustling to get Biden’s priorities wrapped up in the coming months. It’s also hitting them personally as they fear they might soon be out of a job.
The prospect of a Trump return is shaping how one Interior employee and their spouse — another federal worker — are handling their finances.
“We have stopped doing any money-spending things because what if we’re without jobs in the next year?” the Interior employee said. “We need all the savings we can get.”
That couple has put off buying a new car and paying for needed home repairs, that person said. “We’re both feeling the heaviness of this right now.”
That employee and others interviewed for this story spoke to POLITICO’s E&E News on condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation if a Trump administration takes over in January.
“They’re so vindictive, I can see them going back through E&E News articles and saying, ‘You’re fired,’” the Interior employee said.
Neither the Trump nor the Harris campaign responded to requests for comment for this story.
A bull’s-eye on environmental agencies?
At EPA, there’s a feeling that employees there will be “specifically targeted during a Trump administration in the future,” said Nicole Cantello, president of American Federation of Government Employees’ Local 704, which represents workers in EPA’s Chicago-based regional office.
That’s led to a “significant amount of movement of employees out of EPA into what would be called safer agencies,” Cantello said.
She’s noticed a recent trend of staff leaving EPA to move to other agencies, including the Department of Energy and the Department of Commerce, Cantello said.
Those agencies “are not so much under the microscope” and were not so “explicitly attacked by the previous Trump administration.” She attributes the job moves to worries that “it’s not clear who’s going to win this election” and “the risk to EPA employees who stick around” if Trump returns to office.
It’s “in the back of everybody’s mind” that a Trump administration might purge the federal workforce, said one employee at the National Science Foundation.
“People are worried, but anybody who has half a brain is existentially afraid for the safety of democracy,” that person said. At the moment, “people are very concerned with their day-to-day jobs” and are “working to make sure they can get a lot of good done now.”
There was a prevailing feeling of doom and gloom among government employees before Biden dropped out of the presidential race, said the Interior employee. Harris’ entrance into the race brought a sense of relief for some civil servants who thought she stood a better chance at beating Trump, the employee added.
That person would be much more comfortable with Harris in the White House, they said, but they don’t see her victory as a given, although she’s had an edge in some recent polls.
“I just don’t trust polls after Hillary Clinton,” that Interior employee said.
Push to ‘drain the swamp’
Feds’ fears about Trump are justified, said Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat whose district is packed with government employees.
“Federal employees are rightly concerned about what a second Trump presidency will mean for them and, by extension, for the American people they so dutifully serve,” Connolly said.
Trump “has pledged to fire or relocate more than 100,000 federal employees who live and work in the D.C. region. He has repeatedly and shamelessly mocked the work of career experts and scientists, going so far as to scrub references to climate change from government websites. He has even promised to abolish entire government agencies that do not sufficiently bend themselves to his whims,” Connolly said.
Trump and his allies, some of whom are still fuming over feds’ pushback during his first administration, are eager to make changes. Senior energy and environmental appointees who served in the Trump administration have been vocal about their frustrations with civil servants when they were in office.
Trump-era Interior Secretary David Bernhardt penned a book after leaving office titled, “You Report to Me: Accountability for the Failing Administrative State,” where he expressed concerns with the civil service.
And Trump’s former EPA chief of staff, Mandy Gunasekara, recently released a book that criticizes the civil service called, “Y’all Fired: A Southern Belle’s Guide to Restoring Federalism and Draining the Swamp.” In it, she suggested moving the agency’s headquarters to Florida or Texas.
Gunasekara wrote the EPA section of Project 2025, a playbook organized by the conservative Heritage Foundation. She wrote that EPA’s “current activities and staffing levels far exceeded its congressional mandates and purpose.”
Trump has sought to distance himself from Project 2025 on the campaign trail, but his record as president and his comments during this campaign signal that environmental agencies would be on the chopping block. He floated cuts to the Interior Department and to “environmental agencies” more broadly earlier this year.
For now, government employees are scouring the 922-page Project 2025 document for clues about their futures if Trump wins.
“Every federal employee I know” is reading Project 2025, said the Interior employee.
Working overtime
As the Biden administration draws to a close, agency officials have been putting in overtime to wrap up their work, Cantello said.
“We are seeing an increase as a union in overtime and comp time given out for people who are working more than 40 hours a week,” Cantello said. That includes work on things like the massive climate law known as the Inflation Reduction Act, she said, as well as the air and water rules “that the agency is trying to get out before a possible Trump administration takes office.”
There’s a sense at EPA “that we’re all running to catch the train right now before it leaves the station,” Cantello said.
There’s a ton of money at stake.
EPA has obligated $29.1 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act so far, said EPA spokesperson Nick Conger. The agency is on track to obligate nearly $38.3 billion from the law by the end of this calendar year.
“The climate crisis requires immediate action,” Conger said. “Communities are suffering from pollution. EPA is focused on responding to these challenges with urgency.”
Trump, meanwhile, has said he wants to stop climate spending in its tracks. He pledged on the campaign trail to rescind unspent cash from Biden’s signature climate law.
Doing so could be complicated, and Trump would face challenges holding back spending that Congress has approved. But Trump would have several possible avenues to try to block or stall spending on the Biden administration’s $1.6 trillion in climate, energy and infrastructure initiatives.
Less than 17 percent of the $1.1 trillion those laws provided for direct investments on climate, energy and infrastructure had been spent as of April, a POLITICO analysis found.
A Trump return is “a possibility and an eventuality but it’s not real yet,” said one longtime EPA employee who has experienced past presidential transitions.
“Everybody’s just kind of focusing on the mission right now,” that person said. “We’ve still got a lot of work to do under this administration.”
