WASHINGTON — Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin has warned that his agency will have to furlough up to 89% of its more than 12,000-person workforce if the government shutdown lasts beyond this week.
Zeldin told reporters at the EPA’s headquarters in Washington, DC, Tuesday that 4,000 employees have already been furloughed — but officials have been able to prevent a more serious lapse in staffing due to “multi-year funding” keeping the agency afloat.
However, those efforts have stalled some significant projects, including the Brownfields Program to clean up land contaminated by pollutants or other hazardous substances.
The fate of proposed federal rules are also in limbo until the government reopens.
“We have a whole bunch of pots of carryover funding and as that carryover funding runs out, more of the total lapse plan ends up taking effect,” the former Long Island congressman cautioned. “Our preference would be for the shutdown to end.”
“If we are still in a shutdown as we’re getting into the, you know, first, second week of November, the agency would have no choice but to then move towards a third phase of implementing a lapse plan — and we don’t want to have to do that,” he added.
Senate Democrats blocked a vote to re-open the government at current spending levels for a 13th time on Tuesday, imperiling federal benefit programs like food stamps as deadlines loom to pay troops or allow Americans to enroll in health insurance programs.
SNAP food benefits will run out Saturday, the same day open enrollment for ObamaCare begins.
“Democrats were desperately searching,” Zeldin explained, “for some kind of … context or narrative to try to explain why they were fighting just to fight, but at the end of the day, the facts remain that what is motivating this has just been the desire to appease a far-left activist base that wants congressional Democrats to resist, oppose, and obstruct everything and anything.”
The EPA chief took office with more than 16,000 employees under his oversight and set in motion an agency-wide reorganization aimed at trimming the workforce down to roughly 12,500 by the end of this year.
Some agencies have used the shutdown to target grants to left-wing organizations and other funding authorized during the last administration.
Soon after the shutdown began, White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought announced the cancellation of nearly $8 billion in climate-focused federal funding.
Zeldin boasted that his agency had already cut more than $29 billion from a climate “slush fund” for Biden-allied non-governmental organizations as well as solar-related grants before the government’s lights went dark Oct. 1, leaving EPA employees free to pursue critical functions.
He also took aim at a 2009 endangerment finding from former President Barack Obama’s EPA, which he previously dubbed the “holy grail of climate change religion,” that agency officials predict will do away with $1 trillion in regulations — and save energy consumers more than $54 billion every year.
“Our entire regulatory agenda has been moving forward this month,” he said. “The only impact of the shutdown that I could think of is any proposed rule that can’t start a public comment period during a shutdown.”
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