Shutdown threatens further destruction of environment and science agencies, advocates warn
Although the Congress has adopted Bipartisan financing bills which maintain scientific funding for specific agencies, the president and the director of the Budget Budget described the layoffs that could thwart these efforts.
A government closure will probably lead to a new dismantling of the federal agencies of environmental sciences, application and conservation, defenders have warned this week.
The closings of the previous government saw federal employees on leave until the funding resumes. But this time, Russell Vought, director of the management and budget office, told federal agencies to prepare for general layoffs.
“It is fundamentally different,” said Jeremy Symons, climate policy advisor for the Environmental Protection Agency during the Clinton administration, during a press call on Monday by the Environmental Protection Network. “The challenges of this year are different.”
The fragmentary and bipartite bills of the financing of the congress have put forward do not include many deep cuts from these agencies that the Trump administration requested. Symons underlined the EPA financing bill which emerged from the Senate credits committee In July, which would force the Trump administration to restore the EPA research and development office and hire licensed scientists this year. Credit committees in the Chamber and Senate also have rejected the Trump administration plans To eliminate the Research Branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or Noaa.
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Vought, an architect of the 2025 conservative policy road project, reported That the Trump administration would use confrontation as an opportunity to further reduce agencies that have already experienced layoffs, resignations and mass pensions this year.
The execution of layoffs during a closure is part of the Trump administration efforts to dismantle the agencies unilaterally responsible for the environment and application sciences, said Symons, senior EPN advisor, a group of former EPA staff.
“This is a bigger fight to find out if the congress will really be able to intensify and stop this. Because it will continue to happen,” said Symons.
Trump’s political opponents suggested that the administration did not want a budgetary agreement and that fishing instead of taking executive measures during the closure.
Trump told journalists in the White House on Friday: “If he had to stop, he will have to stop.” Sunday, he warned “mass layoffs” in an interview with NBC News. If the government stops, “we are going to cut many people who … we are able to cut permanent,” he said.
It is still not known to what extent these cuts could be due, which they would target or how they would resist probable challenges in court. The defenders of public health and the environment fear that the cuts target the same agencies already worn by a confusing attack on layoffs, buyouts, re -evaluation and legal challenges linked to the agenda of the reduction in the staff of the administration.
The White House has returned questions about the impact of closing on this work with agencies. The representatives of the EPA and the commercial and interior departments did not immediately respond to the requests for comments on the closure.
“I think EPA is very sensitive to additional layoffs,” said Jeanne Briskin, former director of the EPA children’s health office. She noted that the expertise was already lost when the Trump administration eliminated the agency’s environmental justice office and its Office of Research and Development.
“The objective seems to be to remove the expertise and the experience necessary to implement our federal environmental laws on environmental protection, and therefore as long as there are people who know how to do this, I think the objective is to remove this as much as possible,” said Briskin, who retired in 2024 after 40 years at EPA.
Other environmental groups have warned against national parks and the service that maintains them when the government is closed. When the government has partially closed during the first Trump administration, national parks remained open and not performed for 35 days, leading to rampant vandalism, the destruction of housing and the accumulation of waste.
Last week, 35 former superintendents of the National Park Service urged the government to close the parks in the event of closure and prevent new degradation.
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“If you do not act now, the story is not only doomed to repeat itself, the damage could actually be very worse,” they wrote a letter To the interior secretary Doug Burgum.
The letter indicated that the parks were already “pushed to the edge” by staff and budgetary discounts this year. The National Park Service and the US Forest Service appeared among the administration’s priority reductions in its initiatives of “energy domination” aimed at increasing the production of oil, gas and minerals on public land.
Conservation defenders have described discounts as part of larger plans to dismantle agencies so that parks and forests can be privatized. The sale of public lands was part of the 2025 project agenda.
“A government closure will aggravate an already bad situation in national parks and public lands,” said a statement released by the coalition on Tuesday to protect US national parks and the association of national park rangers. “Already pushed to the edge by budget cuts and staff discounts, our parks are on an unsustainable and dangerous path.”
