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Saving the EPA's Research Arm From Trump Will Save Lives
The scientific community won’t stand by while this critical office is at risk of being dismantled.
Mar 27, 2025
When I was an undergraduate, I landed a paid internship that set me on a trajectory to a career in science policy—though of course I didn’t know it at the time. Like many college students, I had no idea what I wanted to do for work.
But my summer with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research and Development in North Carolina opened my eyes. The smart, thoughtful federal scientists I worked with were using their scientific expertise to serve the public good. It was a revelation for a student who wanted to choose a path that positively impacted the world.
Already, the global reputation of the United States as a scientific powerhouse, where scientists from countries around the world come to learn and make discoveries freely, is in tatters.
Over the summer, I learned from a team of hard-working people about everything from pesticide research to health effects of air pollution to detecting water quality contamination. In my mentors, I saw their pride in being federal scientists, part of a robust scientific enterprise, and in advancing the public health and environmental mission of the EPA. I observed the tremendous impact they had improving environmental conditions for the nation, all because they chose to devote their expertise to federal service.
And after that experience, and throughout the years of my career at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and in government, I continued to witness firsthand the incredible impact of the EPA Office of Research and Development in Washington, D.C., and across the country.
What Does the Office Do?
The Research and Development Office is the scientific research arm of the EPA. Its scientists research and communicate the science that serves as the foundation for public health protections for the nation. The office’s work informs decisions on issues that affect our health: from groundbreaking work on the cumulative impacts of pollution on our bodies, to advancing detection and prevention of water and soil pollution, to air quality monitoring and modeling advances, and the integration of climate change and its effects across disciplines.
Despite a long record of world-class research and demonstrated success in its mission, the Trump administration has indicated plans to close the Research and Development Office. But the scientific community won’t stand by while this critical office is at risk of being dismantled.
Earlier this spring, UCS organized and delivered a sign-on letter from 54 scientific societies representing more than 100,000 scientists, demanding that Congress protect and restore life-saving and essential scientific research that benefits families and communities in the U.S.—including the research done by the Research and Development Office.
U.S. Science Is in Danger
The threats to this specific office join a growing list of attacks on federal research activities at large. At the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which conducts medical research and funds such projects at other institutions, measures implemented by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency( DOGE) are hindering federal scientists’ ability to do their jobs within the agency. Cuts to NIH funding for more than 2,500 universities, medical schools, and other research institutions across the country have resulted in canceled clinical trials and studies on diseases, job losses for promising young researchers, and an abrupt end to any research that doesn’t align with the Trump administration’s incoherent preferences.
How amazing, I thought, to be the first to look at a dataset like that, and to have the potential to discover something new that might help us better protect people from harmful pollution.
Cuts to federal funding of academic research are threatening to upend the U.S. university research enterprise and set back the infrastructure and people supporting U.S.-produced science and research by decades. Already, the global reputation of the United States as a scientific powerhouse, where scientists from countries around the world come to learn and make discoveries freely, is in tatters.
Shutting down the research operations of the federal government means closing the door on bright-eyed students like me and other early career researchers, limiting their options in this country (and in many cases, driving them to work abroad). It means missed opportunities to bring young talented scientists into government, creating a brain drain with lasting effects. Shutting down research means chipping away at the scaffolding that upholds federal policy decisions across issue areas, and threatening our ability to make evidence-based policy choices as a nation. And that’s why we cannot allow this to happen.
For Policy Decisions Today and Scientific Progress Tomorrow
As an intern with the EPA Research and Development Office, my project that summer was to analyze air pollution measurements collected in Detroit neighborhoods. The study was intended to help us better understand people’s exposure to air pollution—near roads, in their homes, in the central city, and everywhere in between. How amazing, I thought, to be the first to look at a dataset like that, and to have the potential to discover something new that might help us better protect people from harmful pollution. The sense of wonder I experienced in that lab sparked a personal mission to apply science to help people that has carried me throughout my career.
I think of the wealth of science that’s been produced, the many evidence-based environmental policy decisions made, and the lives saved from air pollution standards in the years since that summer. We’ve come a long way since I was an ambitious young researcher on that tree-covered campus. We can’t give up now. Join us in fighting against these attacks with our Save Science, Save Lives campaign.
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Speaking to Career EPA Staffers Reveals What Will Be Lost if Trump Guts the Agency
If Zeldin, Musk, or Trump knew a scintilla about actual Environmental Protection Agency employees, they would dare not froth at the mouth with their toxic stereotypes about federal civil servants.
Mar 25, 2025
Neither Lee Zeldin, nor Elon Musk, nor President Donald Trump could possibly look Brian Kelly in the eye to tell him to his face that he is lazy.
They cannot tell Kayla Butler she is crooked.
They dare not accuse Luis Antonio Flores or Colin Kramer of lollygagging on the golf course.
If Zeldin, Musk, or Trump knew a scintilla about them, they would dare not froth at the mouth with their toxic stereotypes about federal civil servants. All four work in Region 5 of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), responsible for pollution monitoring, cleanups, community engagement, and emergency hazardous waste response for Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.
A decimated EPA means less scrutiny for another Flint water crisis, less eyeballs on Superfund sites, and limited ability to investigate toxic contamination after train derailments, such as the incident two years ago in East Palestine, Ohio.
The Midwest is historically so saturated with manufacturing that just those six states generated a quarter of the nation’s hazardous waste back in the 1970s, and it is still today home to a quarter of the nation’s facilities reporting to the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory Program. When I recently visited Region 5’s main office in Chicago, one enforcement officer, who did not give her name because of the sensitivity of her job, told me there are still toxic sites where “we show up [and] neither the state nor the EPA has ever been [there] to check.”
With irony, I visited the office the same week the Trump administration and Zeldin, President Trump’s new EPA administrator, announced they planned to cut 65% of the agency’s budget. Zeldin has since then dropped even more bombshells in a brazen attempt to gut the nation’s first line of defense against the poisoning of people, the polluting of the environment, and the proliferation of global warming gases.
Zeldin announced on March 12 more than 30 actions he plans to undertake to weaken or cripple air, water, wastewater, and chemical standards, including eliminating the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights and getting the EPA out of the business of curbing the carbon dioxide and methane gases fueling global warming. Despite record production that has the United States atop the world for oil, Zeldin said he was throttling down on regulations because they are “throttling the oil and gas industry.”
Last week, The New York Timesreported the EPA is considering firing half to three-quarters of its scientists (770 to 1,155 out of 1,540) and closing the Office of Research and Development, the agency’s scientific research office. Zeldin justifies this in part by deriding many EPA programs as “left-wing ideological projects.” He violently brags that he is “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.”
Impact of Cuts at EPA Felt Deeply, Broadly
Kelly, Butler, Flores, Kramer, and many others I talked with in Region 5 said all these plans are actually a bayonet ripping out the heart and soul of their mission. They all spoke to me on the condition that they were talking as members of their union, Local 704 of the American Federation of Government Employees. Nicole Cantello, union president and an EPA attorney, said the attacks on her members are unlike anything she’s seen in her more than 30 years with the agency. As much as prior conservative administrations may have criticized the agency, there’s never been one—until now—that tried to “fire everybody.”
Flores, a chemist who analyzes air, water, and soil samples for everything from lead to PCBs, said a decimated EPA means less scrutiny for another Flint water crisis, less eyeballs on Superfund sites, and limited ability to investigate toxic contamination after train derailments, such as the incident two years ago in East Palestine, Ohio. He added, “And we have a Great Lakes research vessel that tests the water across all the lakes. It’s important for drinking water, tourism, and fishing. If we get crippled, all that goes into question.”
“People will die,” he said. “There will be additional deaths if we roll back these protections.”
Butler is a community involvement coordinator who works through Superfund legislation to inform communities about remediation efforts. She was deeply concerned that urban neighborhoods and rural communities will be denied the scientific resources to tell the full story of environmental injustice. Superfund sites, the legacy of toxic chemicals used in manufacturing, military operations, mining, and landfills, are so poisonous, they can have cumulative, compound effects on affected communities, triggering many diseases. A 2023 EPA Inspector General report said the agency needed stronger policies, guidance, and performance measures to “assess and address cumulative impacts and disproportionate health effects on overburdened communities.”
Butler is deeply concerned cumulative impact assessments will not happen with cuts to the EPA, denying urban neighborhoods and rural communities the scientific resources to fully expose the horror of environmental injustice. “It’s a clear story that they’re trying to erase.” Butler said of the new administration.
For Kelly, an on-site emergency coordinator based out of Michigan, the rollbacks and the erasing of the story of environmental harms have an obvious conclusion. “People will die,” he said. “There will be additional deaths if we roll back these protections.”
What these workers also fear is the slow death of spirit amongst themselves to be civil servants.
Start with Kelly.
I actually talked to him from Chicago by telephone because he was out in Los Angeles County, deployed to assist with the cleanup of the devastating Eaton Fire that killed 17 people and destroyed more than 9,400 structures.
Between the Eaton Fire and the Palisades Fire, which took another 12 lives and destroyed another 6,800 buildings, the EPA conducted what it said was the largest wildfire hazardous materials cleanup in the history of the agency, and likely the most voluminous lithium battery removal in world history—primarily from the electric and hybrid vehicles and home battery storage people were forced to leave behind as they fled.
During a break, Kelly talked about how nimble he and his colleagues must be. He has worked cleanups of monster storms Katrina, Sandy, and Maria, and the East Palestine trail derailment. Based normally out of Michigan, he recalled a day he was working in the Upper Peninsula on a cleanup of an old abandoned mine processing site. He received a call from a state environmental emergency official asking him to drop what he was doing because 20 minutes away a gasoline tanker truck had flipped over, spilling about 6,000 gallons of gasoline onto the roads and down through the storm sewer into local waterways.
When he arrived, Kelly asked the fire chief how he could help. He was asked to set up air monitoring. But then he noticed anxious contractors who were wondering if they were going to get paid for their work. “They’re ordering supplies, they’re putting dirt down to contain this gasoline from getting any further,” Kelly said. “But they’re like, ‘Are we going to get paid for this?’”
“I found the truck driver who was talking to their insurance company. So I get on the phone with the insurance company and say, ‘Hey. This is who I am. This is what’s happening here. You need to come to terms and conditions with these contractors right now or EPA’s going to have to start taking this cleanup over!’”
The insurance was covered. Kelly said he could not have been so assertive with the insurance company without a robust EPA behind him.
“It’s one thing to be able go out and respond to these emergencies, but you have to have attorneys on your side,” Kelly said. “You’ve got to have enforcement specialists behind you. You’ve got to have people who are experts in drinking water and air. You can’t just have one person out there on an island by themselves.”
“Cruel for the Sake of Being Cruel”
Butler wonders if whole communities will become remote islands, surrounded by rising tides of pollution. The very morning of our interview, she was informed she was one of the thousands of federal workers across the nation who had their government purchase cards frozen by Elon Musk, the world’s richest human and President Trump’s destroyer of federal agencies. In launching the freeze, Musk claimed with no evidence, “A lot of shady expenditures happening.”
Butler threw shade on that, saying the purchase system is virtually foolproof with multiple layers of vetting and proof of purchase. She uses her purchase card to buy ads and place public notices in newspapers to keep communities informed about remediation of Superfund sites.
She has also used her card to piece together equipment to fit in a van for a mobile air monitor. The monitor assists with compliance, enforcement, and giving communities a read on possible toxic emissions and dust from nearby industrial operations.
Kramer wonders how many more scientists will follow in his footsteps to see that the work keeps getting done.
“I literally bought the nuts and bolts that feed into this van that allow the scientists to measure all the chemicals, all the air pollution,” Butler said. “I remember seeing the van for the first time after I bought so many things for years. And I was like ‘Wow this is real!’”
Not only was the van real, but air monitoring in general, along with soil monitoring—particularly in places like heavily polluted Southeast Chicago—has been a critical tool of environmental justice to get rid of mountains of petcoke dust and detect neurotoxic manganese dust in the air and lead in backyards.
“Air monitoring created so much momentum for the community and community members to say, ‘This is what we need,’” Butler said.
Kramer is a chemist in quality assurance, working with project planners to devise the most accurate ways of testing for toxic materials, such as for cleanups of sites covered in PFAS—aka “forever chemicals”—from fire retardants, or at old industrial sites saturated with PCBs from churning out electrical equipment, insulation, paints, plastics, or adhesives. His job is mostly behind the scenes, but he understood the meaning of his work from one visit to a site to audit the procedures of the Illinois EPA.
The site had a small local museum dedicated to the Native tribes that first occupied the land. “The curator or director told us how the sampling work was going to bring native insects back to the area and different wildlife back to the streams,” Kramer said. “It was kind of a quick offhand conversation, but it gave me a quick snapshot of the work that’s being done.”
Kramer wonders how many more scientists will follow in his footsteps to see that the work keeps getting done. He remembered a painful day recently when a directive came down that he could not talk to contractors, even those who happen to work in the same building as he does.
“I see them every day,” Kramer said. “They come say hi to me. They know my child’s name. Being told that I couldn’t respond if they came to my desk, looked me in the face, and said, ‘Good morning,’ is just such an unnecessary wrench into our system that just feels cruel for the sake of being cruel.”
Staff Stifled, Heartbroken
The culture of fear is particularly stifling for one staffer who did not want to give her name because she is a liaison to elected officials. Before Zeldin took over, she would get an email from an elected official asking if funding for a project was still on track and “30 seconds later,” as she said, the question would be answered.
Her job “is all about relationships,” keeping officials informed about projects. Now, she said just about everything she depends on to do her job has basically come to a halt. “Everyone’s afraid to say anything, answer emails, put anything in writing without getting approval. Just mass chaos all the way to the top.”
“I feel like I made a promise to them that I would be there for what they needed,” she said. “And I feel like I’ve been forced to go back on that promise.”
Relationships are being upset left and right according to other staffers. One set of my interviews was with three EPA community health workers who feel they are betraying the communities they serve because their contact with them has fluctuated in the first months of the Trump administration. They’ve had to shift from silence to delicately dancing around any conversation that mentions environmental justice or diversity, equity, and inclusion.
They did not want to be named because they did not want to jeopardize the opportunity to still find ways to serve communities historically dumped on with toxic pollution for decades because of racism and classism.
“Literally since January 20, my entire division has been on edge,” said one of the three. “We kind of feel like we’re in the hot seat. A lot of people working on climate are afraid. If you’re working with [people with] lower to moderate income or [places] more populated by people of color, you’re afraid because you don’t want to send off any flags to the administration.”
The tiptoeing is heartbreaking to them because they see firsthand the poisoning of families from chemicals the EPA has regulated. One of the health workers has painful memories of seeing the “devastated” look on mothers’ faces when giving them the results of child lead tests that were well above the hazardous limit. “I feel like I made a promise to them that I would be there for what they needed,” she said. “And I feel like I’ve been forced to go back on that promise.”
Remembering Their Mission Boosts Morale
Despite that, and despite President Trump’s baseless ranting, which included saying during the campaign that “crooked” and “dishonest” federal workers were “destroying this country,” these EPA staffers are far from caving in. Nationally, current and former EPA staff last week published an open letter to the nation that said, “We cannot stand by and allow” the assault on environmental justice programs.
Locally in Region 5, the workers’ union has been trying to keep morale from tanking with town halls, trivia nights, lunch learning sessions, and happy hours. In a day of quiet defiance, many of the 1,000 staffers wore stickers in support of the probationary employees that said, “Don’t Fire New Hires.” Several of the people I interviewed said that if Zeldin and the Trump administration really cared about waste and inefficiency, they would not try to fire tens of thousands of probationary workers across the federal system.
One of them noted how the onboarding process, just to begin her probationary year, took five months. “It wastes all this money onboarding them and then eliminating them,” she said. “That’s totally abusing taxpayer dollars if you ask me. It’s hard enough to get people to work here. We’re powered by smart people who went to school for a long time and could make a lot of money elsewhere.” Federal staffers with advanced degrees make 29% less, on average, than counterparts in the private sector, according to a report last year from the Congressional Budget Office.
“We’re supposed to be this nonpartisan force that’s working for the American people, and attacks to that is a direct attack on the American people.”
Individually, several said they maintained their morale by remembering why they came to the EPA in the first place. Flores, whose public service was embedded into him growing up in a military family, said, “I didn’t want to make the next shampoo,” with his chemistry degrees. “I didn’t want to make a better adhesive for a box… the tangible mission of human health and environmental health is very important me.”
The enforcement officer who wanted to remain anonymous talked about a case where she worked with the state to monitor lead in a fenceline community near a toxic industry. Several children were discovered to have elevated levels of lead in their blood.
“People’ lives are in my hands,” she said. “When we realized how dire the circumstance was, we were able to really speed up our process by working with the company, working with the state, and getting a settlement done quick. And now all those fixes are in place. The lead monitoring has returned back to safe levels, and we know that there aren’t going to be any more kids impacted by this facility.”
One of the community health workers I interviewed said her mission means so much to her because at nine years old she lost her mother to breast cancer after exposure to the solvent trichloroethylene (TCE). That carcinogen is used in home, furniture, and automotive cleaning products. The Biden administration banned TCE in its final weeks, but the Trump administration has delayed implementation.
“The loss of her rippled throughout our community,” the worker said of her mother. “She was active in our church, teaching immigrants in our city how to read. The loss of her had such a large impact.” She said if the EPA were gutted, so many people like her mother would be lost too soon. “We play critical roles beyond just laws and regulations,” she said. “We do serve vital functions for communities based on where the need is the most.”
The same worker worried that if an agency as critical to community health as the EPA can be slashed to a shell of itself, there is no telling what is in store next for the nation. “I know people don’t have a lot of sympathy for bureaucrats,” she said. “But I think what is happening to us is a precursor to what happens to the rest of the country. We’re supposed to be this nonpartisan force that’s working for the American people, and attacks to that is a direct attack on the American people.”
One of her co-workers seconded her by saying, “We’re fighting for the American people and we are the American people. We all began this job for a reason. We all have our ‘why.’ And that hasn’t changed just because the administration has changed, because there’s some backlash or people coming after us. Just grounding yourself with people whose ‘why’ is the same as yours helps a lot.”
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What Would a 21st-Century Nuclear War Really Be Like? The World Needs to Know
The United States should back a proposal for a new United Nations study on the effects of nuclear war, using the latest science.
Oct 31, 2024
Coming up for a vote in early November is a resolution advanced by the Ireland and New Zealand delegations to the United Nations to commission a critical new scientific study on the effects of nuclear war. The study, which would be the first under U.N. auspices in more than 30 years, would be run by an independent scientific panel of 21 members and would examine the physical effects and societal consequences of a nuclear war on local, regional, and planetary scales. It would be comprehensive in its scope, including the climate, environmental, and radiological effects of nuclear war and how these would impact public health, global social and economic systems, agriculture, and ecosystems over periods of days, weeks, and decades.
Our Understanding of the Effects of Nuclear War Needs to Be Updated
That nuclear war would be catastrophic and potentially kill hundreds of millions of people has been well known for decades. But we have reason to believe that our current knowledge is incomplete, and some of it is out of date. Since the last time the U.N. commissioned such a report—its 1988 Study on the Climatic and Other Global Effects of Nuclear War—the world population has grown and changed in distribution, economies have become more interdependent, and the environment more fragile. New scientific information has yielded insights, including updates to our understanding of, and ability to model, the atmosphere, and the studies of the long-term effects of radiation on affected populations have yielded new information. Some of this technical work has been presented in the four Conferences on the Humanitarian Impacts of Nuclear Weapons.
It is also clear that additional research continues to be needed to fill important knowledge gaps. New studies are being published and commissioned and research gaps are being identified. There have been recently updated studies published of the radiological fallout impacts of atmospheric nuclear detonations and of ground bursts, and the U.S. National Academies is currently conducting an Independent Study on Potential Environmental Effects of Nuclear War to try to improve our understanding of the risks and effects of nuclear winter, which recent research suggests could kill hundreds of millions or billions of people. In a 2022 report, the U.S. National Academies urged the development of a research program to better understand the effects of low-dose ionizing radiation using recent advances in epidemiology, biological understanding of disease occurrence, and computational and analytical technologies, and it has also become clear that our understanding of how radiation affects women and children differently than men is incomplete.
As long as countries possess nuclear weapons, nuclear war is a possibility.
There is little current, detailed information available about how even a limited nuclear war could affect social and economic systems, including how damage to industry, energy production, and financial systems would affect human well-being and what subsequent migration, conflict, and disease would result. Studies in the 1980s indicated that a relatively limited nuclear war could cause a U.S. economic collapse, which would take many years to recover from, and larger-scale attacks could cause damage from which recovery might not be possible.
A 2023 study by the U.S. National Academies on Risk Analysis Methods for Nuclear War and Nuclear Terrorism, tasked to look at the likelihood and consequences of different nuclear war scenarios, found the information about the consequences incomplete. Given this, the study advised, “There is a need to improve the understanding of less-well-understood physical effects of nuclear weapons (such as fires; damage in modern urban environments; electromagnetic pulse effects; and climatic effects, such as nuclear winter), as well as the assessment and estimation of psychological, societal, and political consequences of nuclear weapons use.”
Why Would a U.N.-Commissioned Study Be Important?
As long as countries possess nuclear weapons, nuclear war is a possibility. Nuclear war does not respect national boundaries, and countries not party to the conflict may be affected, potentially catastrophically. The global community deserves a rigorous, science-based understanding of these possible consequences. This lack of understanding is not limited to the public. The nuclear war consequence models maintained by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) for the U.S. Department of Defense provide an incomplete picture, according to the 2023 National Academies study, which found these assessments to be “focused on prompt effects and military objectives. This results in a partial accounting of the consequences leading to a limited understanding of the breadth of the outcomes.”
This new U.N. study needs to be legitimate, transparent, inclusive, and accountable. The global community expects this type of authoritative scientific assessment on global existential threats from its international bodies; an example is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that was created to provide governments and the public with regular scientific assessments on climate change, risks posed, and solutions.
What Role Should Scientists Play in Nuclear Weapons Policy?
Scientists have regularly provided critical information and perspectives that have served to sound the alarm on the dangers of the use of nuclear weapons. They’ve done so from the very first moments of the nuclear age, when Manhattan Project scientists wrote the Franck report foretelling the nuclear arms race and signed a Leo Szilard-spearheaded petition to forego the first use of a nuclear bomb. Later, scientists working independently from governments went on to publicly illuminate the dangerous effects of radioactive fallout from atmospheric nuclear explosions on unsuspecting people, and used those findings to create momentum for the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, which kept tests below ground. Scientists have been warning us since the 1980s about nuclear winter—the scenario in which soot from firestorms set off by nuclear war could be lofted into the stratosphere and persist for years, disrupting the climate and thus agriculture on global scales, inducing widespread famine.
In April of this year, the national science academies of the G7 countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States) weighed in, issuing a statement for the first time on nuclear weapons. They declared that “it is imperative to highlight the known consequences of nuclear warfare,” adding that there is strong scientific evidence that “depending on the scale of use of nuclear weapons, there is the potential for the destruction of entire ecosystems and extinction of species, due to the direct impact of explosions and fires and altered climatic conditions. In the worst cases this could be on the scale of a mass extinction.”
The academies further urged the scientific community “to continue to develop and communicate the scientific evidence base that shows the catastrophic effects of nuclear warfare on human populations and other species with which we share our planet.”
The United States Should Support This Resolution—and Urge Other Nations to Follow Suit
Given that the United States relies on a strategy of nuclear deterrence, which seeks to obtain security by threatening nuclear war, it seems obvious that this country should want to fully understand the risks it is running.
Nuclear-armed states do not run these risks alone. The rest of the world can be affected by nuclear war via radioactive fallout, environmental changes such as nuclear winter, and disruption of the global economic system. Almost any nuclear war would be a global problem.
As a country with a strong global leadership role, the United States should co-sponsor this resolution and encourage its allies to do the same. The United States should also provide technical advice and offer the participation of its most knowledgeable scientists, while supporting the participation of scientists from a wide range of other nations and communities to ensure their perspectives are included in the scoping and execution of the study.
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