Details are scarce on U.S. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s plans to cut his agency’s spending by 65% or more, but some of its 15,000 full-time-equivalent positions and grants to recycling programs across the country could be on the chopping block.
The plan was announced by President Donald Trump in his first public Cabinet meeting on Feb. 26, where he said Zeldin told him about cutting 65% of employees. Zeldin later that day amended the statement, telling Spectrum News it would be a cut in overall spending rather than personnel only.
“I actually think it’s a low number. I think that the EPA can save even more than 65% of our budget year over year,” he continued, pointing to agency grants, office space and around 1,000 employees who “are no longer going to be at the agency” as potential cuts.
“The ultimate goal of this conversation is that bottom line, that dollar: to make sure we’re executing the mission amazingly, fulfilling our statutory obligations, doing a great job, and doing it without wasting a penny,” he said.
Reached Monday, the EPA provided little more detail, saying Trump and Zeldin “are in lock step.”
“In his first term, President Trump advanced conservation and environmental stewardship while promoting economic growth for families across the country and will continue to do so this term,” the agency’s press office wrote in an email.
Outside of the agency, Howard Husock, a senior fellow at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute think tank, wrote on March 1 that the EPA had “strayed far from its mandate” in multiple ways and should discard its national recycling rate goal of 50% by 2030.
“Instead of putting plastic in those blue bins, we should establish systems to recover valuable ‘e-waste,’ the rare earth elements and metals found in cellphones and other electronics — in other words, the very same things the Trump administration is working to get from Ukraine,” he said, adding he supported incineration or landfilling instead. “There is no current realistic market for recycled plastic.”
But others described broad rollbacks as devastating to EPA’s conservation and resource-management efforts. A 65% cut in the agency’s roughly $10 billion budget would bring it close to a record low, when adjusting for inflation, since Republican President Richard Nixon and a bipartisan Congress created the agency in 1970.
“As former E.P.A. heads under both Republican and Democratic administrations, we fear that such cuts would render the agency incapable of protecting Americans from grave threats in our air, water and land,” Zeldin predecessors William K. Reilly, Christine Todd Whitman and Gina McCarthy wrote in a New York Times op-ed. “When the next catastrophe that spews pollutants into the air or contaminants into our drinking water or food supply arrives, who will deal with the emergency and its aftermath?”
Besides setting the national goal, EPA’s recycling work has included decades of data collection and other assessments of the recycling system as well as roughly $200 million in grants in recent years for recycling infrastructure, local data and education campaigns.
Many of those grants had been paused following the administration’s opening salvo of executive orders freezing funding throughout the federal government. The administration rescinded some of those freezes within days, but several recipients of Recycling Education and Outreach grants said their work was in limbo for weeks as lawsuits and court orders to unfreeze federal aid poured in around the country.
“If we can’t get reimbursement, we can’t make payroll and we have to let people go,” Joshua O’Halloran, district manager of the Ciudad Soil and Water Conservation District in New Mexico, said on Feb. 6. The district is in the midst of spending a $590,000 grant for collaborating with local schools and other organizations in low-income and disadvantaged areas.
“It’s kind of delayed us and caused a lot of conversations with partners,” he said at the time. “We have the risk of losing trust with them, and that was a bigger deal than anything.”
By Feb. 13, O’Halloran said he had received the all-clear from EPA to continue, though some other recipients said they had yet to hear the same. By Feb. 20, an EPA spokesperson confirmed in an email: “Funding is now accessible to all recipients.”
On the Solid Waste Infrastructure for Recycling side, at least one recipient still didn’t have access to the funding as of March 4. Emily Malik, sustainability programs manager for the city of Logan, Utah, said the city has completed design work and bought equipment for a biosolid composting facility expansion but hasn’t been able to get any reimbursements from its $4 million SWIFR grant or put the facility’s construction out to bid.
Other SWIFR grants across the country include upgrades to transfer stations and recycling centers, curbside program expansions and collection trucks.
“They said keep checking, so we just keep checking,” Malik said of the city’s EPA contacts, adding the grant is a matching one, so at least Logan hasn’t yet exceeded its expected share of costs. “I laugh because I don’t know what else to do.”
A second round of infrastructure and education grants opened last fall; tribes, local governments and other groups had until December in some cases and until this month in others to apply for a slice of a $100 million pie. EPA was set to review those applications this spring and summer with awards possibly by next winter.
A version of this story appeared in Plastics Recycling Update on Mar. 5.
