As EPA’s Environmental Justice Employees Lose Their Jobs, New York Community Groups Pay the Price

The federal agency’s environmental justice office played a crucial role in helping New Yorkers reverse environmental burdens in their neighborhoods, according to EPA employees and community groups who spoke with City Limits.

When Earth Day rolled around on April 22, employees who care for mother nature at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) didn’t have much to celebrate. 

The night before, the Trump administration notified over 450 staff members who work with environmental justice or diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) that their jobs were on the chopping block. Plans to “terminate” these divisions were announced in March and are now officially underway.

The latest notification known as a “reduction in force,” which goes into effect July 31, will start the termination process for 280 employees, according to an EPA spokesperson. Another 175 staffers are getting “reassigned to other offices.”

The cuts are being carried out thanks to an executive order the president issued in late January to end “radical and wasteful DEI programs” as well as “environmental justice (EJ) offices and positions.”

“Instead of directly helping communities in need, the left has lined the pockets of their allies in the name of Environmental Justice,” Lee Zeldin, head of the EPA said on X about pulling the plug on the division.

But locally, the EPA’s environmental justice office played a crucial role in helping New Yorkers reverse environmental burdens in their neighborhoods, according to employees and community groups who spoke with City Limits.

EPA’s Region 2—which serves New York, New Jersey, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and eight Tribal Nations—launched its EJ division in 2022 with the purpose of addressing community concerns that the agency’s other programs couldn’t.

The office expanded the network of community groups in New York that received resources and support from the federal government, and brought state and city agencies together to tackle environmental issues.

“[Terminating the EJ division] is going to hurt communities that have been underserved, and overburdened. That’s the big shame of it to me,” an EPA employee who asked to remain anonymous told City Limits. 

It’s also causing widespread panic. As EJ offices dissolve and mass layoffs of federal workers continue across the country in the name of cutting costs, those still employed fear for the future of their jobs.

“We’re all in the office working full time, but it’s like being a dead man walking, because you know at any time that you could be next,” said Ed Guster, union president for Local 3911, the EPA chapter of the federal workers union AFGE.

What does the EJ division actually do?

In 2021, the environmental lawyer Lisa Garcia stepped into her role as head administrator for Region 2 with plans to address a pressing problem.

While the EPA has “community involvement coordinators” doing outreach in contaminated areas that have been designated federal Superfund sites where clean-up is required, Garcia says they don’t have the authority to go beyond the scope of their projects. 

“Their work does not cover all of the United States and the rest of the country should have access to the EPA too,” she told City Limits.

In the fall of 2022, the Biden administration set out to reach communities that had previously been left out by merging three existing national programs into the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights. Under Garcia, Region 2 followed suit by launching its own EJ division that same year.

“The goal was to extend our relationships. We were pushing the envelope by going out to places and hearing about environmental problems from communities we hadn’t heard from,” she added.

The Trump administration, however, said in an email that getting rid of the EJ division “is the first step in a broader effort to ensure that EPA meets its core mission of protecting human health and the environment and Powering the Great American Comeback.” The so-called comeback aims to accomplish a series of goals including “restoring American Energy Dominance,” referring to Donald Trump’s push to develop more oil and gas.

Getting rid of environmental justice offices would also “directly benefit the American people,” Travis Voyles, assistant deputy administrator for the EPA, said in a memo circulated to employees last week and reviewed by City Limits.

But for the South Bronx residents who care for the Rainbow Garden of Life and Health on Melrose Avenue, the EPA’s environmental justice team played a crucial role.

When state authorities failed to meet with them about their desire to establish a clear timeline for cleaning up a contaminated lot next door to their community garden, residents say the EPA got them to act.

Since 2021, residents have wanted to meet with the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) about the neighboring lot, which is a designated brownfield, or a chronically vacant or underutilized toxic land that the DEC is tasked with remediating.

It wasn’t until the EPA got involved and toured the site last November that the DEC told residents it would be hosting the first in-person meeting with them in the South Bronx in March, a resident told City Limits.

“I’m pretty certain that the [DEC] agreed they had to do something because of that meeting we had with the EPA,” said Angel Garcia, who helps run the Melrose community garden.

“If there’s nobody in the EPA offices saying more community outreach should be done, I don’t see how any of the state environmental agencies are going to feel pressured to really inform their communities,” Garcia added.

The DEC said in an email that it “remains committed to environmental justice” and that it keeps communities informed about cleanups by distributing fact sheets and sending updates via email that people can sign up for on the agency’s website. They also underscored that they partner with local stakeholders and officials to spread the word.

But EPA’s EJ offices provided an extra channel for community members to address environmental concerns in the South Bronx and beyond.

In Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood—where air pollution has risen to levels the EPA considers potentially harmful for sensitive groups—the EJ office gave a local organization, the Red Hook Initiative, support and resources to launch an air monitoring program. 

The EJ division also hosted a tour around the area’s ports so community leaders could show local authorities how the transportation of goods impacts their neighborhoods, according to a participating environmental group that asked to remain anonymous.

For fear of losing their federal funding, some environmental groups approached by City Limits refrained from sharing testimonies of how the EPA’s EJ offices helped them. 

And inside the EPA, other departments say that they too are feeling the blow from the EJ division’s fallout.

‘As miserable as possible’

When Suzanne Englot, executive vice president of Local 3911, heard that the EJ division employees received notices on their impending job losses, she took to the streets to protest. After picketing in front of EPA’s Manhattan headquarters with around a dozen other employees, she joined environmental groups on an Earth Day march to City Hall.

Although Englot isn’t an EJ employee and works instead with enforcing the regulation of waste and toxic substances, she says everyone is shaken up by the cuts. “Everything is being affected. It feels like no one’s work is truly safe,” Englot said.

She’s one of the few employees in the Region 2 offices speaking up. Most are afraid to voice their concerns.

“Morale is low,” a staffer who asked to remain anonymous said. Employees say the staffing shake up and recent changes in environmental policies are impacting productivity across departments.

“At this moment, it just feels really hard to do anything, even as someone who’s not directly in the line of fire for losing their job at this moment,” Englot explained. “We’re just all very uncertain about the future of the agency.”

On March 25, Zeldin announced a massive rollback of environmental regulations put forth by the Biden Administration. 

In a video posted on the social network X, Zeldin promised to end Biden-era policies that he refers to as “the Green New Scam.” The decision, he claimed, would cut “trillions in regulatory costs for everyday Americans.”

The policies, which Zeldin says “restrict nearly every sector of our economy,” include initiatives that established limits on greenhouse gasses from fossil fuel power plants and regulated emissions for light, medium, and heavy-duty vehicles.

The EPA also removed an interactive map called the EJ Screen from its website. The tool combined demographic and environmental information to identify areas disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards. Harvard University, which teamed up with the EPA to create the platform, is working on getting a new version of it up and running. 

And wide-spread chaos has ensued as staff gets fired and reinstated across the agency, which has reportedly already lost 1,000 workers.

In February, some EPA environmental justice staffers were put on administrative leave, and several probationary workers were terminated. Then in March, dozens of employees that were placed on leave got reinstated, and hundreds of probationary workers were reportedly rehired.

Employees say supervisors are being notified in real time about the decisions happening up top so that everyone is left scrambling when a change is suddenly made.

“There’s a lot of panic,” said Guster. He works at the EPA as a crisis manager, helping people impacted by an emergency, like the wildfires that engulfed California, access psychological care.

The agency also ended remote work and telework for most of its employees. For Guster, who lives in Philadelphia, that means spending three hours commuting every day. 

“I have to go back to the office full time even though we have had telework in some sort of fashion for the last 20-plus years. The idea is to make the employee’s life as miserable as possible so that they quit,” Guster added.

Legal expert Timothy Whitehouse, executive director at the law group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, agrees.

“They want to create uncertainty. They want to make people not want to be able to come into work and they want people to quit the government,” said Whitehouse, who is helping federal workers legally challenge Trump’s mass layoffs.

For the second time since Trump took office, EPA employees were asked by email this week if they would like to voluntarily retire or choose what is called deferred resignation, which allows them to resign but continue to get paid through the fall.  

Whitehouse says Trump’s insistence on reducing the federal workforce at any cost, and his desire to get rid of the environmental justice department at the EPA, is leading the United States down a dangerous path.

“We’re slipping into a totalitarian form of government where the president can just decide what they like and don’t like and fire people at random, and no one has the power to do anything about it,” he said.

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