As the lunch hour hit on Tuesday, dozens of Environmental and Protection Agency workers emerged from their office in downtown Boston and did something many federal employees have been scared to do: speak out against the Trump administration.
Some at the rally said they hoped to draw public attention to the EPA’s mission, as the White House promises more layoffs and undercuts longstanding efforts with moves like rewriting the agency’s 2009 finding that greenhouse gas emissions should be regulated under the Clean Air Act. The rally outside the Boston EPA office — which covers all of New England — was one of many such rallies of federal environmental workers around the country on Tuesday.
“I’m saying these remarks on my own time in my own private citizen status,” Abby Swain qualified as she answered a question. Swain has worked at the EPA for 35 years, and said it’s still her dream job. Her focus is on regulating emissions from cargo traffic.
“What I’m concerned about is the administration’s sort of sideways attempt to cut out the next generation of EPA staff,” Swain said. “Some of us need to retire presently, and we’d like to, in an orderly fashion, transfer expertise and our tools to the next generation.”
That can’t happen, she said, if the agency’s newest employees are being let go. Many of the workers fired so far in the Trump administration’s effort to slash the federal workforce have been so-called “probationary employees” with fewer protections because they haven’t held their jobs long.
“What I’m concerned about is the administration’s sort of sideways attempt to cut out the next generation of EPA staff.”Abby Swain, EPA worker
Dana Donovan, who started her job as a clean air inspector last summer, shares Swain’s concerns. She said if the agency doesn’t retain enough newer staff to replace the workers who are retiring, they won’t be able to ensure businesses are in compliance with Clean Air Act regulations.
“You’re losing all that time and energy that you spent to train me to become an inspector if you just get rid of me, just because I haven’t been here long enough,” Donovan said.
Jack Melcher, a vice president of the AFGE Local 3428 union that represents these EPA workers, said he worries the public doesn’t fully understand what the agency does or the impact of further cuts. President Donald Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin have said they plan to slash the agency’s budget by 65%.
“I think a lot of people get lost in the bureaucracy and the acronyms, but at the end of the day, we protect human health and the environment,” Melcher said.
“I’m an inspector,” he said, “and if I can’t go and inspect the facilities, if there are fewer people with jobs like mine, then industry will take that as a license to pollute.”
Dan LaFrance works on an EPA team that’s cleaning up contaminated Superfund sites.
“There are new sites getting added nationally every year, so the work continues,” LaFrance said. “It’s not a program that, you know, came and went in the ’80s. This is still an ongoing thing. And as it is, we’re working on cleaning up sites every day.”
Jeff Dewey also works on the Superfund program
“If we have less resources, if we have less people to enforce those laws and to ensure that the polluters are paying for the clean up of that contamination, we’re going to get more contamination,” he said. “Contamination cleanups are going to happen a lot slower. And people are going to suffer the consequences, unfortunately.”
Another EPA worker, Robin Johnson, said she saw Tuesday’s rally as a rare moment to register her opinion about what’s happening at the agency.
“There are some inefficiencies in federal government that I think would be a good target for cuts,” she conceded. “But the way it’s happening now, it’s going to cause more harm than good, and it’s probably going to end up costing the government more money in the long run.”
It was important to come to this rally to advocate for the communities the EPA serves, Donovan said.
“I think we’re proud of the work we do,” she said. “We know we’re doing the right thing, and we just want to keep being able to do that. And so we’re standing up for what we think is right.”
And then, when their lunch break was over, these EPA employees went back inside their office building and went back to work.
