Hundreds of Environmental Protection Agency employees were put on administrative leave for two months this summer after signing a letter criticizing the agency’s leadership for deregulation efforts and for disregarding scientific expertise. Last month, most of them were disciplined with a two-week unpaid suspension, and about 15 were fired.
Lane To is an environmental engineer recently dismissed from the EPA.
They joined GBH’s All Things Considered guest host Craig LeMoult to discuss what’s happening at the agency. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
Craig LeMoult: You started working for the EPA last November, right?
Lane To: Correct.
LeMoult: What was your job like? What did you do for the agency?
To: So, I was hired to be an air permit writer. I’m an environmental engineer by training, and the state departments of environmental protection receive these permit applications from all of these factories, emitters, what have you. We, as the national EPA, have to review those to make sure everything checks out. We ensure that these sources are being regulated correctly so that our air doesn’t get over-polluted.
LeMoult: Less than two months into your job, Donald Trump became president. Did you notice any changes in the agency after that happened?
To: I think after the first set of executive orders the president signed on his first day in office, morale started to go down a little bit. One of the executive orders was specifically targeting wind energy, stopping offshore wind turbine construction, and that’s actually one of the things my branch worked on, because those are in federal waters and they’re not belonging to any particular state. So, our work in that area was pretty much put on pause since January, and as far as I’m aware, it hasn’t started up.
There were a lot of colleagues of mine who worked on things like grants to do climate change-related things or environmental justice-related projects, and a lot of that funding was frozen.
LeMoult: At some point, you were approached about signing a letter of dissent. What was your thought process around signing that?
To: Well, honestly, I didn’t think it was that big of a deal. I kind of approached it with the same mindset one would approach signing a Change.org petition or one of those, you know, Whitehouse.gov petitions that any citizen can sign.
This one was a little bit more specific. It was in our workplace and directed at our leadership, but I didn’t think it was as big of a deal as it turned out to be.
LeMoult: Tell me about the letter you signed. What did it say?
To: The letter is primarily just citing different decisions that this administration has made regarding the environment: rolling back environmental justice programs, freezing funding for projects related to climate change, rolling back mercury, greenhouse gases, asbestos regulations and overall just deregulating a lot of the pollution regulations that have existed for a while.
We don’t think that’s in the best interest of protecting human health or the environment, which is the mission of the EPA. And we felt that scientific consensus was being ignored by the people in charge to further certain political goals by this administration.
LeMoult: After you signed the letter, what did you hear back from the EPA?
To: A lot of people who signed a letter with their names received notice of administrative leave on July 3, I believe, right before the July Fourth holiday. For some reason, I didn’t receive that, even though I had signed with my name. And I thought I was in the clear. I kept going to work for the next two weeks, you know, business as usual. And I felt bad for my colleagues who were on administrative leave. I was worried for their jobs and hoping that everything would work out well for them.
What I didn’t expect was two weeks later, on I think July 17, I received the same email telling me that I was placed on administrative leave. And since then, I had been on leave for the two months with the rest of my colleagues who were previously placed on leave.
LeMoult: What was it like to be on administrative leave this summer?
To: Really weird. It felt weird not to be paid to not go to work. We’re all here because we want to protect the environment, and I don’t think any of us were happy about it. I was in the middle of doing a project at work that I was looking forward to finishing. I was a day away from finishing it, and I had colleagues who had very important work be placed on hold. And the thing with this administrative leave was we weren’t really given an end date. It kept getting extended in two-week increments.
LeMoult: How did you find out you were being fired?
To: I just received an email shortly after 5 p.m. on a Friday and it said “notice of termination.” It was from our regional administrator, and it just had an attached letter that said, “your previous notice of proposed suspension is being rescinded, and we are now issuing you a notice of termination.”
LeMoult: What was your reaction when you read that?
To: Disbelief. They had told me they were going to suspend me, so it was confusing, and I wasn’t sure if maybe they had sent it to the wrong person or something like that. But, you know, I read through it, and it was for me. They cited in the letter that, you know, my hiring status, the fact that I’m part of this program where I’m in a one-year trial period, and they said that my employment was no longer in the public interest.
LeMoult: Do you think your employment was in the public interest?
To: Well, I was working on permits that are legally required as part of the Clean Air Act, and now there’s one less person doing that. So I think my work was in the public interest.
Construction projects that are planning on moving forward and need clearances are perhaps going to be slower to get to that point because there’s less people reviewing permits.
And in cases where a permit might be violated and they’re waiting on action on EPA’s part to do something about that, a polluter could keep polluting for a longer amount of time because there’s less people working.
LeMoult: What do you think people should take from your experience at the EPA?
To: Well, I don’t think anyone should be discouraged by it. What I don’t want is for people who are engineers, scientists who want to work in this field, and who, like me, their dream job was to work at the EPA, I don’t want my experience to turn you away from that. It hasn’t turned me away from it. I fully plan on coming back to public service one day, not right now. It hasn’t turned me away from public service completely because it’s what I’ve always wanted to do. And even though things are maybe a little bleak right now, I don’t think that should turn people away from entering public service.
For me, at the end of the day, I’m gonna recover from being fired, but the bigger picture and what concerns me more and what should concern everybody else more, is that this administration’s actions are going to have an effect on vulnerable communities and the environment, and that negative effect is way more concerning to me than me losing my job, which I will recover from eventually.
