Environmental Protection Agency employees who expected to be furloughed in the government shutdown were working on Wednesday after receiving a letter late Tuesday instructing them to “work on activities which currently have funds available.”
It was unclear how many of the 15,166 employees at the E.P.A. received the exemption notice, but union officials said that they believed it to have been nearly the entire staff.
A spokeswoman for Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, said that the agency was operating under its shutdown plan. That plan, however, calls for only 1,734 employees — about 11 percent of the staff — to continue working.
Federal agencies do have balances of appropriated funds that carry over from the previous funding period. Those funds could be used to stay operational for a short time — typically a week or two — after a government shutdown. But Trump administration officials have not acknowledged whether the E.P.A. is being kept open from those funds or from other unspent money from laws passed during the Biden administration.
E.P.A. employees said that they were working without pay, and that Trump administration officials had not told workers how long the funding would last.
“Continue to work on initiatives as directed by your leadership,” Aaron Szabo, who leads E.P.A.’s air office, said in a memo to his staff on Wednesday reviewed by The New York Times. He advised that employees would be “notified if there is any change in status.”
The lack of transparency, union leaders said, has fed the chaos surrounding the Trump administration’s plans for federal workers amid the impasse between Republicans and Democrats over spending.
“Workers at the E.P.A. are highly confused by the behavior of this administration, where they have published shutdown plans that call for furloughs and layoffs but then send out messaging to staff that they are exempted from the shutdown while funds are available,” said Justin Chen, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Council 238, which represents many E.P.A. employees, in a statement. He added: “This administration should stop playing games with federal workers.”
Representative Chellie Pingree of Maine, the top Democrat on the appropriations subcommittee overseeing the E.P.A., said in a statement that the agency’s lack of clarity was “deeply unfair to public servants who deserve straight answers about their jobs.”
Lisa Friedman is a Times reporter who writes about how governments are addressing climate change and the effects of those policies on communities.
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