EPA’s supporters are warning that relocating its headquarters outside of the nation’s capital could be catastrophic for the agency.
On the campaign trail, President-elect Donald Trump pledged to shift parts of the federal government outside of Washington, an effort he began during his last administration. Now, those at EPA worry their agency could be up for relocation as Trump seeks to shatter the “Deep State” in his coming second term.
Nate James, president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 3331, which represents EPA headquarters employees, said many staff would leave the agency, choosing to stay with their families, rather than move to wherever the agency landed.
“This would be a devastating blow that would make it very difficult for what would be left of the agency, at least at the headquarters, to accomplish the mission,” James told POLITICO’s E&E News. “Because it could be advertised as a relocation, but really it would be decapitation.”
On Friday, The New York Times reported that Trump’s transition team is discussing moving EPA headquarters outside of Washington. If such a plan came to fruition, thousands of staffers would have to choose whether to upend their lives and follow the agency to its new home.
Jeremy Symons, a senior adviser to the Environmental Protection Network, a group of former EPA officials who defend the agency, said moving its headquarters is “an EPA demolition plan disguised as a relocation plan.”
“Their only goal is to force dedicated scientists and experts who protect public health out of EPA so they can hand the keys over to corporate polluters,” said Symons, who served as a climate policy adviser in EPA’s air office.
Trump campaign press officials didn’t respond to questions for this story.
EPA has 10 regional branches as well as smaller satellite offices and laboratories dotted around the country. But its headquarters, located in the William Jefferson Clinton and Ronald Reagan buildings in downtown Washington, is easily its biggest location.
Close to 8,000 full-time employees, funded by EPA’s core appropriations, are based at its headquarters, according to a quarterly workforce report from earlier this year. Staffing levels have grown during the Biden administration, with roughly 16,000 personnel across the agency now.
In a campaign video posted online last year, Trump pointed to his decision to relocate the Bureau of Land Management’s headquarters to Grand Junction, Colorado, completed in 2020. He said as many as 100,000 government positions can be shifted elsewhere.
“And I mean immediately out of Washington to places filled with patriots who love America, and they really do love America,” Trump said.
Hundreds of employees left BLM instead of moving to Colorado. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland later returned the agency’s headquarters to Washington.
Trump’s allies have pushed to relocate EPA as well. Mandy Gunasekara, who served as a top air official and later chief of staff at the last Trump EPA, said in her new book, “Y’all Fired: A Southern Belle’s Guide to Restoring Federalism and Draining the Swamp,” that the agency’s headquarters should move to Florida or Texas.
Those states “are just two examples that came to mind,” she said in an E&E News interview last month. “I think of places where there is topographical diversity, there’s sophistication dealing with environmental issues and then also bringing EPA closer to the people and entities that they ultimately regulate.”
Gunasekara also authored the EPA chapter for Project 2025, a plan coordinated by the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation for the next Republican president. That proposal recommended consolidating regional labs and eliminating various offices.
Nevertheless, James said asking EPA employees to move would lead to the agency’s institutional knowledge walking out the door instead.
“For a lot of them, it may very well put them out of a job,” said the union leader. “It’s not just like you just pack up and go on a whim. It’s not like a vacation or anything. It’s more like you’re uprooting someone, their own livelihood.”
Headquarters assessment on track
The incoming Trump administration will come into office as EPA reviews the real estate footprint of its headquarters.
The agency told staff in July that it plans to consolidate its Washington home and might release multiple buildings in the complex. The push could save millions of taxpayer dollars but also give Trump another opportunity to downsize EPA.
“Whatever the appropriate threshold is for our space use, as good stewards of taxpayer dollars, we cannot continue operating with so much of our space underused,” Dan Coogan, a deputy assistant administrator in the mission support office, told EPA employees in an email.
The agency’s staff has not spent much time in the headquarters’ office space since the Covid-19 pandemic. EPA’s telework-eligible employees spent 35.8 percent of their regular hours working in the office, according to an Office of Management and Budget report released earlier this year.
The agency anticipates completing its real estate assessment by “mid-2025,” Coogan said. EPA spokesperson Andrea Drinkard confirmed the agency is still on track to meet that deadline.
If Trump plans to relocate EPA’s headquarters, it would fit with his history with the agency.
His previous administration closed a Las Vegas finance center and research site and pushed to move a Houston lab to Ada, Oklahoma.
EPA had also proposed to shift roughly 1,200 employees to its Washington headquarters from an Arlington, Virginia, office, which has since been shuttered.
Lawmakers on Capitol Hill protested some of those moves, including closing a regional lab in Richmond, California, with their complaints persisting into the Biden administration.
Symons said he believes relocating EPA’s headquarters would be “a runaround of Congress.” He noted that last time Trump was in office, his proposed budget cuts to slash the agency were rejected by both Republicans and Democrats.
“The fight to save EPA starts now,” Symons said. “We have the public on our side because it’s their health that’s at stake.”
