“The future of the EPA and our planet are at stake.”
Emissions rise from the smokestacks at a coal fired power plant near Emmett, Kansas in September, 2022 Associated Press
By Lylla Younes, Grist
Thousands of employees of the Environmental Protection Agency are lobbying this week for Congress to address staffing issues that they say are limiting their ability to meaningfully carry out the Biden administration’s ambitious climate goals.
Leaders of AFGE Council 238, a union representing roughly half of the EPA’s 14,000-member workforce, said in a memo that non-competitive salaries and a lack of career development opportunities are fueling attrition and overburdening staff. Congress could address these issues by expanding the EPA’s funding in the annual appropriations legislation, which it will write later this year. Failure to do so, the union warned, will jeopardize the implementation of President Joe Biden’s two major legislative achievements — the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.
Union leaders began briefing members of Congress about the situation on Monday, presenting them with a series of demands that include the creation of a more robust promotion structure and the development of a program to support equity and inclusion. Staffers are also planning a rally at EPA headquarters on Wednesday.
Sources familiar with the EPA’s workforce told Grist that the actions on Capitol Hill this week have been a long time coming.
The EPA has spent the past six years embroiled in multiple crises. Hundreds of senior staff members departed after former President Donald Trump rolled back dozens of environmental safeguards, creating gaps in institutional knowledge that continue to haunt the agency today. The COVID-19 pandemic further hobbled enforcement programs, as on-the-ground inspection rates for power plants, refineries, and other pollution sources plunged.
Now, the threat of climate change is expanding the EPA’s mission in a way that Congress could not have imagined when the agency was founded in the early 1970s. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act will require staff members to dole out billions of dollars in grants to state and local initiatives and expand its Superfund cleanup program to protect communities of color living near sites of uncontrolled contamination. The agency will take on these efforts at the same time as it fulfills its regular statutory duties, which include developing complicated new rules to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and vehicles and increasing enforcement efforts to ensure companies are abiding by those regulations. But staffing levels have not kept up with these expanded duties.
Today, the workforce is around the size that it was under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. The AFGE has said that the agency will need 20,000 full-time staff, a 40 percent increase, to carry out the programs it has been tasked with.
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