The Trump administration may end up chainsawing itself in the foot with aggressive science-related cuts at agencies like EPA and the Interior Department.
Through a messy combination of mass layoffs, targeted office closings, encouraged retirements and frozen funding, the federal agencies are remaking their once-vigorous science programs.
All of which, scientists and their allies warn, will hurt the government’s ability to perform, even when it comes to implementing President Donald Trump’s agenda. Scientists are crucial to plan, permit, regulate and conserve, whether it’s a decision to protect a species, site a solar farm, build a pipeline or allow a chemical to enter the market.
“The administration is slashing funding for scientific agencies, terminating grants to scientists, defunding their laboratories, and hampering international scientific collaboration,” more than 1,900 leading U.S. scientists wrote in an open letter last month.
Mary Lou Zoback, for one, is a former U.S. Geological Survey senior research scientist who warns that the science cuts could end up undermining the Trump administration’s own ability to secure speedier permits for mining and energy development projects on federal lands.
“There’s nothing to permit if you don’t know what the mineral potential is, or the oil and gas potential,” Zoback said, adding that “all that analysis on federal land is done by the USGS.”
In March, USGS published its assessment that 47 million barrels of oil and 876 billion cubic feet of gas were technically recoverable from formations throughout parts of Wyoming, South Dakota, Montana and Nebraska.
Zoback noted that “a lot of painstaking, old-fashioned field work” makes that kind of mapping possible, which means the loss of 240 USGS probationary employees in February and the prospect of more personnel losses to come seriously handicap the labor-intensive work.
At EPA, research supports the permitting decisions of state environmental departments as well as the federal agency’s own regulatory actions. The agency’s reported plans to reassign or lay off a majority of its Office of Research and Development employees triggered alarms.
“By eliminating ORD as an office, that puts organizations back out on their own,” said Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta, a former EPA science adviser and head of ORD. “It eliminates that central focus to coordinate activities. It all goes against the rhetoric of increased efficiencies and better utilizing taxpayer dollars.”
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum have separately insisted that they will retain the employees necessary to accomplish the administration’s energy-centered agenda.
“Anyone who is involved with permitting, we’re going to make sure they will continue to have their jobs, and we’ll give them tools to go faster,” Burgum told POLITICO at an energy conference last month.
Recent offers of early retirement and deferred resignation to Interior employees largely exempted people in permitting-related jobs, including those related to the Endangered Species Act, along with hydrologists and geologists.
In a similar vein, Zeldin sought to reassure state environmental leaders at a recent conference.
“I don’t want to lose a single good employee,” Zeldin said. “We’re filled up with PhD-level scientists, amazing talent. They love EPA, they love the mission, and they’re fantastic.”
Zeldin added that “if they’re doing a statutory obligation, I want them, I need them, to continue to do that statutory obligation.”
But both Burgum and Zeldin could be challenged to meet their commitments.
‘People will leave the field’
Interior axed 1,700 workers in the first round of personnel cuts. Those terminated included 240 from USGS, according to Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee.
More cuts are coming, as the department was ordered to draft a plan for an additional reduction in force.
In addition to the direct impact from the loss of scientists and other staffers, Zoback noted the indirect impacts that include widespread demoralization among those who stay.
“I get so angry when people say dismissive things about the federal workforce,” said Zoback, who formerly oversaw the USGS earthquake program for the western United States. “They are the most dedicated people. They really believe in public service.”
Paul Segall, a former USGS geophysicist who is now a professor in Stanford’s Department of Earth Sciences, said that graduate students are “seriously depressed” about their job prospects, which will lead to the potential long-term loss of talented recruits.
“People will leave the field,” Segall said. “They will go work on some data mining thing, or, God forbid, crypto. Some people here on visas will have to leave the country, and it will be a reverse brain drain. We will lose talent, there’s no question.”
Burgum’s insistence that his department will retain the staff necessary to handle permitting and other priorities was echoed by Interior spokesperson Elizabeth Peace.
“USGS scientific work is continuing without interruption, and we do not anticipate any impacts to our operations or ongoing research efforts,” Peace said. “We remain focused on our responsibilities and will continue to provide accurate, timely information to support decision-making at every level.”
EPA, too, confronts backlogs aggravated by a lack of resources, including a stack of roughly 400 new chemicals waiting for review before being allowed to enter the market.
Zeldin said he is considering plans that would reassign employees from the research office to the chemicals office in order to help clear the backlog faster.
“That’s great for the chemicals office, but it’s going to leave a vacuum for the water and for the air [offices] and the regions,” Orme-Zavaleta said.
Trade groups like the American Chemistry Council have long protested the existence of the research office’s Integrated Risk Information System, or IRIS, as “out of step with the best available science and methods” and “harm[s] American competitiveness,” an ACC spokesperson said in a statement.
Meanwhile the chemicals office “performs essential permitting and review functions for industrial, agricultural, and specialty chemicals” that could use additional resources “if necessary,” the spokesperson continued.
EPA spokesperson Molly Vaseliou in an email reaffirmed “no decisions have been made” and the agency “is taking exciting steps as we enter the next phase of organizational improvements” but did not provide any specifics.
Indirect impacts
While Trump administration leaders have voiced support for scientists doing work related to their regulatory agenda, they could miss out on the future practical applications of basic science research if that ends up on the chopping block. The implications of that work can often take time to surface.
Arthur Lachenbruch, for instance, was a seasoned USGS geophysicist who was fascinated by permafrost. It seemed to be of mostly academic interest. Then, in a now-legendary 1969 chance meeting in a men’s restroom, Lachenbruch learned from another USGS geologist about industry plans to bury the proposed Alaska oil pipeline.
Alarmed, Lachenbruch immediately saw the problem of pushing hot oil through permafrost. His subsequent calculations showed the buried pipeline would melt the permafrost into a slurry 25 feet deep. The pipeline was eventually moved above ground.
“He was very theoretical, and he kind of came at it from just a scientific interest,” Zoback said. “So it was just totally serendipitous. If he hadn’t happened to run into this other person, who knows, but the Alaska pipeline was almost an incredible environmental disaster.”
Beyond the loss of personnel, Interior’s termination of science-related grants and contracts have their own potential for indirect impacts, such as reducing productivity.
The Bureau of Reclamation, for instance, ended a $36,000 contract that provided scientific note-taking services and USGS canceled a $9,000 contract for upgrading a science library in Madison, Wisconsin, according to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which has been spearheading the cost-cutting efforts across the federal government.
The downstream problems created by short-term savings could become more explicit in the case of the Bureau of Land Management saving $440,000 by terminating a contract for an inventory of freshwater mussels in Oregon.
The banal-sounding mussels inventory might have helped inform the Fish and Wildlife Service’s deliberations over listing the western ridged mussel under the Endangered Species Act. Inadequate information, in turn, can render a delayed or poorly justified ESA decision vulnerable to legal challenge.
Zeldin, who at EPA has taken major steps toward rolling back dozens of environmental regulations, has recognized the threat of litigation and has reassured that “any statutory obligation EPA has, we’re going to fulfill. We want to fulfill,” he said last month in front of the state environmental regulators.
“Forever chemicals” could be the litmus test.
Zeldin has said PFAS is “a big concern of mine.” And among his deregulatory actions, the two major Biden-era per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances rules — limiting the substances in drinking water and making them subject to Superfund cleanups — remain in effect.
PFAS research is something “all of the research programs and all of the research centers have a contribution” on, Orme-Zavaleta said.
Key lawmakers, including Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, the chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, want EPA researchers to take the lead on regulating those chemicals.
“We have to scrap our personal beliefs and rely on the science,” Capito said. “I would say, honestly, that this is a role that EPA should and always has played.”
Zeldin has yet to decide which scientists are critical to his business-friendly, “energy dominance” mission for EPA. But he’s starting with those in the Office of Research and Development.
“One of my priorities is getting rid of all of these backlogs,” Zeldin said last week at the Environmental Council of the States conference. “It’s going to involve utilizing some of that talent that’s currently working on other things inside of the Office of Research and Development. So a decision will get made. I’m not there yet.”
