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The Trump administration’s decision to dismantle the research unit of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has led to a lesser-known California agency known as the Bureau of Environmental Protection, being poised to take on an even bigger role in filling the gap.
This month’s EPA announced it would remove nearly 4,000 employees as part of its “power reduction” cost-cutting. Most of them are staff from the Research and Development Bureau. The cuts will save agents $748.8 million, officials said.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, the EPA will take a closer look at our business, ensure our agency is equipped more than ever, and realize our core mission to protect human health and the environment while supporting the great American comeback,” read EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s statement. “This power cut will allow us to better meet that mission while being the head of our hard-earned taxes.”
Ever since the EPA was founded by President Richard Nixon in 1970, the ORD has been in operation, focusing on conducting scientific research to promote the EPA’s goal of protecting human health and the environment.
Experts say the decision to disband the lab will send a cold signal of science, leaving more communities at environmental risk, such as industrial chemicals, wildfire smoke, and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFA, all subject to departmental analysis.
“People in this country are not very useful in these actions,” read the statement from Jennifer Orm Zavareta, former assistant deputy administrator of the EPA principal. “They are left more vulnerable.”
They also move responsibility to California and other states to fill the void left by the federal government. Ord’s research focused on cleaning up super fund sites and environmental disasters such as wildfires in Los Angeles and East Palestine, Ohio.
“There’s another East Palestine, another Exon Valdes [oil spill] Tracey Woodruff, a professor at UC San Francisco and former senior scientist and policy advisor at the EPA’s Bureau of Policy, said:
The Golden State appears to be in a better position than many others. Particularly through a small and powerful environmental health hazard assessment within the California Environmental Protection Agency, or through Oeha.
“For some time, California has been developing a rather robust infrastructure that assesses the health damage of toxic chemicals and contaminants,” Woodruff said. “That way, we’re better than most other states because we have such a great group of scientists than most other states.”
In fact, California is known for several stricter health-based standards and regulations, including the Proposition 65 warning posted by businesses across the state to advise people about the existence of cancer-causing chemicals that Oehaa overseen.
By dismantling the ORD, the EPA is further politicizing the independent science and research that underpins regulations in more countries, said Jana Garcia, California’s environmental secretary. California is dedicated to such science, but she said other states may not be that lucky.
“We will continue to keep Oeja’s work strong and continue to be committed to it, but we understand that this loss really means,” Garcia said. “It’s a huge loss for California. This is an even greater loss for many other states like us who don’t have an office for environmental health hazard assessments.”
Oehha Director Kris Thayer came to the agency from ORD. There, she directed an IRIS program to identify and characterize human health hazards from chemicals. She said the state “will definitely see any way you can fill the gap with resources in mind, but I’m sure I’ll feel in a pinch of this.”
“Not only does it reduce the amount of valuations, but it also reduces the reliability of valuations because it is developed by programs that have more opportunities for political interference in terms of shaping science,” she said.
The chemical industry and other anti-regulatory groups are lobbying for the EPA to limit the impact of the ORD. A January letter to Zeldin, led by the American Chemistry Council and 80 other organizations, said the risk assessment developed by the ORD was “used to develop overly burdensome regulations regarding critical chemistry that are essential to daily use products.”
In particular, they cited government evaluations of chemicals such as formaldehyde, inorganic arsenic and hexavalent chromium that can be used or created in industrial processes. The group accused the agency of a lack of fairness and transparency, slow processes and a lack of limited peer reviews.
Sayer noted that many of the evaluation work carried out by ORD are being used in California. Meanwhile, many states and EPA programs are also turning their eyes to California’s assessments.
“We’re going to monitor how this unfolds, but we’re certainly trying to do everything we can to meet our capabilities — we can’t fully fulfill it — and we know that our work will not only affect California, but we can use it in other states,” she said.
Garcia said California has hired many people from the federal government over the past year and is open to absorbing more EPA employees who have been fired recently. Oehha has many open positions.
“California is still open [a] A rigorous, science-based approach to health and environmental protection,” Garcia said.
UCSF’s Woodruff said it hopes California and other states will invest more in Oehaa and other scientific institutions by providing better pay and strengthening staff numbers. But in the end, she said that Golden State will use this moment to serve as an example for others to follow.
“California could be a true leader in every other state, and they want to continue to do their right by their constituents and address exposure to toxic chemicals,” she said.
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