How the Government Shutdown Could Affect Environmental Agencies

We have more coverage of the government shutdown below, but here is the latest:

The Energy Department said on Wednesday night that it would cancel more than $7.5 billion in Biden-era awards for hundreds of energy projects, with the vast majority located in states led by Democrats. The move underscored how the Trump administration appeared to be using the government shutdown as a pretext to punish its political opponents.
The White House canceled about $26 billion in previously approved funds for climate and transportation projects, mostly in blue states.

E.P.A. employees left in limbo during the shutdown

On Wednesday, Day 1 of the government shutdown, I wrote about the widespread confusion at the Environmental Protection Agency, where Trump administration officials said they would follow a plan calling for a skeleton crew of agency employees, but then ordered nearly everyone to continue work.

It’s now Day 2 of the shutdown and there’s still little clarity around what funding the agency responsible for protecting America’s air and water is using to keep employees on the job, or how long it will last. Some federal agencies do have balances of appropriated funds that carry over from the previous funding period, but the Trump administration hasn’t confirmed how E.PA. operations are being funded.

One thing that is clear: The longer the shutdown lasts, the more activities will grind to a halt.

When the E.P.A.’s shutdown plan does go into effect, major elements of the agency’s work will cease, including civil enforcement inspections, the on-site visits to chemical facilities and other plants that ensure compliance with environmental regulations. So would the issuance of new contracts and permits.

Cleanup at hazardous waste areas known as Superfund sites would be decided on a case-by-case basis, but would generally only continue in areas where stopping would pose an imminent threat to human life.

Something that could take a serious hit is E.P.A. Administrator Lee Zeldin’s plan to repeal dozens of air, water and climate regulations. Before they are finalized, many of those rollbacks require months of analysis of their economic and health effects. If workers are furloughed, that would be put on hold.

In the meantime, employees at E.P.A. report being in a state of limbo.

Under a plan the Trump administration issued this week, the E.P.A. said it would place about 90 percent of its staff on furlough in the event of a shutdown. But late on Tuesday, hours before the government ran out of money, at least some agency employees received an email saying they “work on activities which currently have funds available” and should report to work as usual.

The E.P.A. declined to say how many of the 15,166 employees at the agency had received the exemption notice, but union officials said that they believed it to have been nearly the entire staff. The E.P.A. is not telling its own staff, or the public, how long it will keep the agency running.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is telling agencies to plan for additional layoffs above and beyond furloughs.

E.P.A. employees I texted with on Tuesday described feeling like they were on a guillotine. Before the shutdown, the E.P.A. had been in the process of reducing the agency’s total work force by 3,700 to 12,448, a nearly 23 percent reduction in staffing levels compared with January.

Justin Chen, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Council 238, which represents many E.P.A. employees, accused the administration of “playing games with federal workers.”

The E.PA. issued a statement blaming Democrats for the shutdown, and in a post Thursday on Truth Social President Trump said more cuts to federal agencies could be coming.

Who will keep national parks clean?

Maxine Joselow

Overflowing toilets. Piles of trash. Chopped-down trees. These are all examples of damage at national parks during the last government shutdown in December 2018 and January 2019, when the first Trump administration kept parks open to the public but furloughed the majority of staff members who manage them.

Current and former park employees told me that this shutdown could inflict even greater damage, depending on its duration. They noted that the National Park Service had already lost 24 percent of its permanent employees since President Trump took office, while more than 9,000 of its remaining 14,500 employees have been furloughed.

Jim Schaberl, who retired last year as division chief for natural and cultural resources at Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, told me he is especially worried that piles of garbage could attract black bears, while injured visitors could wait longer for medical attention or evacuations.

“October is usually the busiest month for the park, and we would typically try to staff up during that time,” he said. “This is the reverse, where there are fewer staff to start with.”

Read more on the shutdown:

The shutdown is converging with key deadlines for funding of disaster preparedness and federal flood insurance, threatening to expose thousands of Americans to flood losses and stall thousands of real estate sales.
Even the Statue of Liberty’s torch could go dark.

In memoriam

The quiet power of Jane Goodall

David Gelles

The first time I met Jane Goodall, she was nursing a glass of Irish whiskey, neat. It was 2019 and I was interviewing her for a column on leadership after she had just finished a long day of public appearances.

The whiskey was not to calm her nerves, she told me, but to help soothe her voice.

This is what Goodall did toward the end of her extraordinary life. She talked. To anyone who would listen. To presidents and preschoolers. In classrooms and at keynotes. She was indefatigable, traveling relentlessly and imploring humanity to protect the natural world.

Her stump speech had long ago moved beyond discussing her groundbreaking work with chimpanzees that had made her famous. Instead, she preached a message of interdependence, the need to care for the planet and our fragile role in the web of life.

I didn’t blink when Goodall told me she needed the whiskey. She spoke softly, her voice sometimes little more than a whisper. She was petite, too. But her presence filled the room.

It wasn’t only her celebrity that lit people up with delight. Rather, there was a quasi-spiritual quality to Goodall, a sense that she somehow embodied the wisdom of the world.

She was cleareyed about the precarious state of the natural environment, about the threats posed by biodiversity loss and climate change. And yet she was still compassionate, still joyful, still hopeful. As my colleague Catrin Einhorn wrote yesterday, she seemed “full of quiet energy. She was gentle and sharp, all at once.” (Read the entire piece here.)

Over the past few years, I stayed in touch with Goodall, catching up with her at gala dinners and at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. We didn’t talk that often, but when we did we would talk about climate change and animals and children, and even Donald Trump.

Just as often, however, we would sit together and sometimes not say a word.

During her days as a primatologist in Tanzania, Goodall spent long stretches of her life alone in the wilderness as she observed Flo, Fifi and David Greybeard and many others, earning their trust and discovering that chimps are not so unlike we humans. She learned to be perfectly at peace away from the thrum of the modern world, totally comfortable in absolute silence.

The last time I saw Goodall, she had yet again finished a long day of public appearances. She was tired of talking, so after exchanging a few pleasantries, we sat down and stayed there for 30 minutes or so, sometimes locking eyes, sometimes looking out the window and into the mountains.

Then she gave me a hug and we said goodbye.

In his own words

“Citizens need to take an active role in political decision making at national, regional and local levels. Only then will it be possible to mitigate the damage done to the environment.”

Those are the words of Pope Leo, who called on Catholics and all other citizens of the world on Wednesday to carry on the environmental advocacy of his predecessor, Francis, and not to treat it as a “divisive” issue.

Mokoto Rich reports that Pope Leo spoke for just over 10 minutes in an auditorium where he shared a stage with the actor and former governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Brazil’s climate minister, on the grounds of the papal summer residence of Castel Gandolfo, about 17 miles southeast of the Vatican. Leo focused on the action that individuals and local communities can take to alleviate increasing climate pressure.

“Everyone in society, through nongovernmental organizations and advocacy groups, must put pressure on governments to develop and implement more rigorous regulations, procedures and controls,” he said.

Read more.

More climate news from around the web:

Swiss glaciers shrank by 3 percent this year, the fourth-largest retreat on record, The Associated Press reports.
An ambitious fund to save the rainforests, which Brazil aims to start at November’s COP30 climate summit, is running behind schedule as officials deliberate on how to structure the complex financial vehicle, Bloomberg reports. (Read our reporting from last year on Brazil’s fund.)

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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