The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency this week terminated more than two dozen remaining staffers in the now-defunct Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights (OEJECR), advancing the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the environmental justice initiatives of the president’s Democratic predecessors.
A Reduction In Force, or RIF, notice obtained and reviewed by Inside Climate News was sent to affected employees on Monday, July 25. The three-page memorandum, issued by Associate Deputy Administrator Travis Voyles, lays out the legal basis for the layoffs.
“You will be separated from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The decision to conduct a RIF has been made pursuant to Executive Order 14151, Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing, and Executive Order 14210, Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Workforce Optimization Initiative,” the memo states.
The memo says the action was to “eliminate waste, bloat, and insularity” in order to “empower American families, workers, taxpayers, and our system of Government itself.” It further states that the impacted employees “do not have an assignment right to another position in the competitive area” and confirms a termination date of Aug. 25, 2025.
The latest firings reflect the Trump administration’s policy to roll back science and equity-focused initiatives across federal agencies, with the EPA facing some of the most significant policy reversals. The agency has faced extensive layoffs, regulatory reversals and funding cuts, which particularly impacted programs related to climate change, environmental justice and public health protections.
The agency press office confirmed the terminations at the agency’s Washington, D.C. headquarters via an RIF action.
“On Monday, August 25, 2025, as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to terminate the Biden-Harris Administration’s environmental justice arm, EPA abolished, through a Reduction in Force (RIF), 29 EJ positions located in Washington D.C. headquarters offices,” the agency said in a written response.
“EPA conducted this RIF in accordance with federal RIF regulations,” the statement added. “This is one of many steps the Trump EPA is taking to ensure that the agency is best positioned to meet its core mission of protecting human health and the environment and Powering the Great American Comeback.”
The agency further acknowledged that the OEJECR has been officially abolished, referencing an earlier press release announcing that the EPA was terminating the arm of the agency that included programs like Justice40 and multi-billion-dollar environmental justice block grants.
The OEJECR was created in September 2022 by merging three separate programs at the agency including the External Civil Rights Compliance Office, Conflict Prevention and Resolution Center and the Office of Environmental Justice, which had operated since the early 1990s. Back then, it provided technical and financial assistance to overburdened communities at a much smaller scale.
Having been remade into a national program office during the Biden administration, OEJECR was tasked with managing more than $3 billion in environmental and climate justice block grants as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. The grants were designed to fund community solutions to environmental harms in overburdened communities—including lead pipe replacement and green workforce training. But by late spring, the Trump administration had begun rescinding funds and cancelling these programs.
Jeremy Simons, a senior advisor at the Environmental Protection Network, an alliance of former EPA staff, called the layoffs of environmental justice and civil rights staff “painful to see,” and warned that “without EPA staff on the job, the air we breathe and the water we drink will be at greater risk from toxic pollution that causes cancer, asthma attacks, lung disease and other health threats.”
“Don’t listen to what Lee Zeldin says. Pay attention to what EPA is doing.”
— Jeremy Simons, Environmental Protection Network
He criticized the administration for what he described as prioritizing political ideology over public health, particularly in communities already overburdened by pollution. “It’s yet another case where the Trump administration and [EPA Administrator] Lee Zeldin are putting political ideology ahead of the health of Americans,” Simons said.
He rejected the administration’s framing of the layoffs as a strategy to better meet EPA’s core mission, urging the public to judge the agency by its actions, not its language.
“Don’t listen to what Lee Zeldin says. Pay attention to what EPA is doing,” Simons said. “What EPA is doing is systematically putting the interest of corporate polluters and political ideology ahead of EPA’s mission of protecting public health and the environment.”
“The really sad thing here is that most people won’t know that they’ve been exposed to even more pollution as a result of these actions until it’s too late,” he said.
The agency started laying off staff quietly back in February. Inside Climate News had reported that EPA had placed its entire environmental justice workforce on leave pending a decision whether to terminate or reassign them. The agency at the time said it placed the 168 staffers on administrative leave “as their function did not relate to the agency’s statutory duties or grant work.”
One former staff member who worked in the policy and analysis division and was targeted in the latest round of terminations described the intervening months as “heartbreaking.”
“We went from doing the most impactful work of our lives—designing grant programs to deliver federal dollars directly to underserved communities—to watching the office die from within. By spring, we knew we were next,” he said. He requested not to be named, fearing reprisal.
Other affected employees took to social media platforms, venting their feelings after being laid off. “I was RIF’d (laid off) from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and next Monday is my mother’s memorial. Please pray for me,” wrote Nadira Branch, an EPA special advisor for implementation, in a LinkedIn post.
“They finally got us. After many months of uncertainty, most of the staff of EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, myself included, were subject to a Reduction in Force on Monday,” wrote Matt Sehrsweeney in another social post.
“Working in OEJECR was truly a dream job,” the former EPA policy analyst said. “I’ve never worked with such a remarkably brilliant and passionate group of colleagues, all deeply dedicated to reducing environmental harms borne by our most overburdened and vulnerable neighbors.”
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Aman Azhar is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist who covers environmental justice for Inside Climate News with focus on Baltimore-Maryland area. He has previously worked as a broadcast journalist and multimedia producer for the BBC World Service, VOA News and other international news organizations, reporting from London, Islamabad, the United Arab Emirates and New York. He holds a graduate degree in Anthropology of Media from University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and an MA in Political Science from the University of the Punjab, and is the recipient of the Chevening scholarship from the UK government and an academic scholarship for graduate studies from the Australian government.
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