EPA has made significant gains in staffing under President Joe Biden. President-elect Donald Trump will try to undo them.

When Biden took office almost four years ago, he promised to rebuild the EPA, where hundreds of employees left amid frustration with the first Trump administration. The agency has made progress on hiring more staff with cash from Biden’s climate and infrastructure bills, which have increased its workload.

As a result, EPA has more. The agency has increased its staff by about 5,200 employees since his arrival, director Michael Regan said in a speech this June.

Trump, who promised to break up federal agencies on the campaign trail, is not expected to follow suit.

“I’m not surprised, but I’m opposed,” Myron Ebell, who led Trump’s first EPA transition team, told POLITICO’s E&E News about the agency’s hiring spree. “I hope the second Trump administration will do something about this.”

Stan Meiburg, who served as EPA deputy administrator during the Obama administration, said the agency has long been short-staffed. There is a constant loss of personnel due to retirement, transfer and resignation.

“If you stand still, you’re losing about 1,000 people a year,” Meiburg said. “They are actively trying to recruit because there is all this work to do.”

Quarterly workforce report The data, obtained by E&E News under the Freedom of Information Act, offers a snapshot of the agency’s staffing levels and how much it needs to grow.

According to the Aug. 20 report, EPA funds approximately 14,336 actual full-time equivalents using its base appropriations, while its target is 15,130 FTEs. In addition, using another funding stream from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the agency has approximately 861 funds. actual FTEs are below the 1,260 target.

FTEs are the hours a full-time employee works each year; This corresponds to approximately 2,080 working hours.

Given his history with the agency, Trump will not seek those staffing levels. In the previous period, first budget proposal He demanded a massive 31 percent cut in EPA funding and capped the number of employees at 11,611.

Congress did not mind, despite Republican control. The agency was relatively adequately funded during Trump’s last presidency.

“You can see how much protection federal civil servants have, even with Republican members of Congress who are so-called budget cutters,” said Ebell, who is now president of the American Territories Council.

An EPA spokesperson acknowledged questions for this story but did not provide a response.

Acquisitions and Schedule F

EPA employees are worried about Trump’s return, considering what difficult times his last administration had.

The agency may encounter retirement wave Among the aging workforce, some are already planning to leave. This could give Trump the opportunity to shrink the EPA’s staff.

“People will say, ‘I’m disgusted with what Trump wants to do and I’m leaving.’ ‘I don’t want anything to do with this.’ And then you don’t change them,” Ebell said.

The president-elect could try another method his administration used during the initial transition.

In 2017, EPA attempted to reduce its staff by 1,227 positions by offering a buyout. Efforts were insufficient only 362 employees received offers.

Trump could try to reclassify career workers, making them easier to fire. He has vowed to revive his executive order creating Schedule F, a new class of civil servants who essentially act at will.

Agencies had just begun identifying employees who might be on Schedule F before Trump left office last time. Documents show EPA found 579 positions fits into this category.

Biden rescinded the decision and imposed a rule that would prevent its return. To repeal this rule, Trump will need to initiate a new rulemaking process that will take time.

“The idea behind Plan F is absolutely necessary if we are going to take control of the federal bureaucracy,” Ebell said. “It will take some time to actually implement this because there will be all kinds of challenges to it.”

Project 2025 plan for EPAThis event, organized by the conservative Heritage Foundation, will likely reduce the agency’s staff. The proposal would eliminate a special hiring authority to hire scientists, terminate new hires in “low-value programs” and relocate Senior Executive Service positions, among other moves.

EPA funding cuts

Trump has said he would roll back funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, which could affect the EPA because it received $41.5 billion from the law.

Ebell also recommended Trump submit a “major budget cut proposal” and forward it to lawmakers. He thinks the president-elect could be more successful this time.

“I think there will be a much stronger focus on budget cuts from both the Trump administration and the Office of the President,” Ebell said. “Now it’s in the Senate, God only knows.”

A smaller budget would reduce EPA staffing. In this case, the Trump administration may have to implement a “reduction in force”, which means laying off staff.

This could spell trouble for Trump’s deregulation efforts. He has promised to cut 10 rules for every new rule that would have a major impact on a major regulator like the EPA.

“The reduction in force is so devastating that simply implementing it could bring the agency to a near standstill,” said Meiburg, who is now executive director of Wake Forest University’s Andrew Sabin Family Center for the Environment and Sustainability. “If there is a policy agenda that the administration wants to pursue that would create so much disruption, the organization will not advance that agenda.”