Trump Is Eradicating the Federal Workforce, and With it Your Right to Clean Air and Water | Opinion

"At this time, we cannot give you full assurance regarding the certainty of your position or agency but should your position be eliminated you will be treated with dignity and will be afforded the protections in place for such positions."

This is from an email that hit the inboxes of about 2 million federal employees last month. It came from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), at the directive of President Donald Trump. Since then, the administration has gutted the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) environmental justice office, placing nearly 200 federal workers tasked with reducing environmental harms impacting under-represented and marginalized communities on leave, and threatened over 1,000 probationary employees with firings unprecedented in scope and scale. Every day it seems the administration is choosing a new group of federal workers to target, and we don't know what's coming next.

In my 33 years at the EPA, I've seen my fair share of egregious political attacks on our agency, but I have never seen such cynical and blatant acts of political interference from a presidential administration. Nearly one month in, Trump has made clear his deep contempt for civil servants and demonstrated that he is hellbent on demolishing our workforce—and with it, our planet.

I regret to inform you that this hollowing out of our government will result in dire consequences.

The vast majority of Americans know climate change is here. Unprecedented wildfires in California burned over 16,000 homes and structures in January. At the same time, we saw a once-in-a-lifetime deadly winter storm in the South. It's become increasingly hard for Americans to ignore the crisis as their communities get upended in an instant.

This is why Americans overwhelmingly support the EPA. A recent poll of 2024 election voters found that 76 percent of Trump voters and 86 percent of all voters oppose attempts to weaken the EPA. Eighty-one percent of Trump voters and 88 percent of all voters want Congress to increase EPA funding or keep funding steady.

As president of AFGE Council 238, representing over 8,400 EPA workers nationwide, I can tell you the work we do to respond to these disasters is invaluable. But Trump has constructed a narrative that we are not only useless to the functioning of our government, but that we bring no value to the functioning of American society.

Beyond our work to find solutions to combat climate change, we work behind the scenes to ensure we all have clean air to breathe and safe water to drink. That our work often appears invisible is not evidence that we don't bring value; it's the very opposite. When you turn on your faucet and are greeted with clean, drinkable water, you probably don't give it a second thought. That means we are doing our job correctly.

Trump's repeated rhetoric vilifying federal employees plays on the very fact that our achievements are often taken for granted. The downfall of the EPA will mean decades of progress we have made in fighting the climate crisis will be undone. Our resources and ability to regulate dangerous chemicals, research solutions to the most pressing environmental problems, keep our water lead- and contaminant-free, and ensure entities follow federal requirements that protect human health will disappear.

The contributions of EPA workers benefit every American, regardless of political affiliation. Whether you are Republican or Democrat, you value having a clean, safe environment. You want your children and your children's children to have a habitable planet. You want to breathe fresh air and easily access clean water without fear of getting sick.

We faced monumental attacks under Trump's first term when he gutted our agency, depleted our resources, and rolled back critical regulations that put Americans' health at risk. The EPA survived, but barely. Since then, we built back up our workforce, doubling down on our commitment to our country. Our union even went as far as to reach a historic contract with the agency, in preparation for a potential second Trump presidency. Knowing his intentions, if elected, AFGE secured language that ensures whistleblower protections, a commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) for all EPA employees, and even won a first-of-its-kind scientific integrity provision to safeguard the scientific principles that guide our work.

The contract puts our members in the best possible position to continue with the EPA's mission, but within the first few weeks of Trump's second term it is apparent this administration has no interest in respecting the law.

We know this is not going to be an easy or fair fight, but our commitment to keep this country safe and healthy remains. We are prepared to fight back to preserve the EPA and execute on our mission to protect human health and the environment.

Marie Owens Powell is president of AFGE Council 238, representing over 8,400 EPA workers across the country.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.