A government shutdown will likely lead to further dismantling of federal environmental science, enforcement and conservation agencies, advocates warned this week.
Previous government shutdowns have seen federal employees furloughed until funding resumes. But this time, Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, has told federal agencies to prepare for widespread layoffs.
“That is fundamentally different,” said Jeremy Symons, a climate policy advisor for the Environmental Protection Agency during the Clinton administration, in a press call Monday hosted by the Environmental Protection Network. “The stakes of this year are different.”
The piecemeal, bipartisan funding bills Congress has put forth don’t include many of the deep cuts to these agencies the Trump administration requested. Symons pointed to the EPA funding bill that emerged from the Senate Appropriations Committee in July, which would force the Trump administration to re-establish the EPA’s Office of Research and Development and hire back the scientists laid off this year. Both the House and Senate Appropriations Committees have also rejected the Trump administration’s plans to eliminate the research arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA.
Vought, an architect of conservative policy roadmap Project 2025, has signaled that the Trump administration would use a standoff as an opportunity to further shrink agencies that already have seen massive layoffs, resignations and retirements this year.
Executing layoffs during a shutdown is part of the Trump administration’s effort to unilaterally dismantle agencies responsible for environmental science and enforcement, said Symons, a senior advisor to the EPN, a group of former EPA staff.
“This is a bigger fight of whether or not Congress is going to actually be able to step up and stop this. Because it will just continue to happen,” Symons said.
Trump’s political opponents have suggested the administration doesn’t want a budget deal and is angling instead to take executive actions during the shutdown.
Trump told reporters at the White House on Friday, “if it has to shut down, it’ll have to shut down.” On Sunday, he warned of “mass firings” in an NBC News interview. If the government shuts down, “we are going to cut a lot of the people that … we’re able to cut on a permanent basis,” he said.
It remains unclear how sweeping those cuts might be, who they would target or how they would stand up to likely challenges in court. Advocates for public health and the environment fear the cuts will target the same agencies already worn down by a confusing onslaught of layoffs, buyouts, re-hirings and legal challenges related to the administration’s downsizing agenda.
The White House referred questions on the shutdown’s impact on this work to the agencies. Representatives for the EPA and the commerce and interior departments did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the shutdown.
“I think the EPA is very susceptible to additional layoffs,” said Jeanne Briskin, former director of the EPA’s Office of Children’s Health Protection. She noted that expertise was already lost when the Trump administration eliminated the agency’s environmental justice office and its Office of Research and Development.
“The goal seems to be to remove the expertise and the experience necessary to implement our federal environmental protection laws, and so as long as there are people there who know how to do that, I think the goal is to strip that out as much as possible,” said Briskin, who retired in 2024 after 40 years at the EPA.
Other environmental groups have warned of threats to the national parks and the service that maintains them during a government shutdown. When the government partially shut down during the first Trump administration, national parks remained open and unstaffed for 35 days, leading to rampant vandalism, habitat destruction and accumulation of garbage.
Last week, 35 former superintendents of the National Park Service urged the government to close the parks if a shutdown occurs and prevent further degradation.
“If you don’t act now, history is not just doomed to repeat itself, the damage could in fact be much worse,” they wrote in a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.
The letter said parks were already “pushed to the brink” by staffing and budget reductions this year. Both the National Park Service and the U.S. Forest Service were among the administration’s priority cuts as part of its “energy dominance” initiatives to increase production of oil, gas and minerals on public lands.
Conservation advocates have described the cutbacks as part of larger plans to dismantle the agencies so parks and forests can be privatized. The sale of public lands was part of the Project 2025 agenda.
“A government shutdown will make an already bad situation at national parks and public lands far worse,” said a statement issued Tuesday by the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks and the Association of National Park Rangers. “Already pushed to the brink by budget cuts and staff reductions, our parks are on an unsustainable and dangerous path.”
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Dylan Baddour covers the energy sector and environmental justice in Texas. Born in Houston, he’s worked the business desk at the Houston Chronicle, covered the U.S.-Mexico border for international outlets and reported for several years from Colombia for media like The Washington Post, BBC News and The Atlantic. He also spent two years investigating armed groups in Latin America for the global security department at Facebook before returning to Texas journalism. Baddour holds bachelor’s degrees in journalism and Latin American studies from the University of Texas at Austin. He has lived in Argentina, Kazakhstan and Colombia and speaks fluent Spanish.
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Marianne Lavelle is the Washington, D.C. bureau chief for Inside Climate News. She has covered environment, science, law, and business in Washington, D.C. for more than two decades. She has won the Polk Award, the Investigative Editors and Reporters Award, and numerous other honors. Lavelle spent four years as online energy news editor and writer at National Geographic. She spearheaded a project on climate lobbying for the nonprofit journalism organization, the Center for Public Integrity. She also has worked at U.S. News and World Report magazine and The National Law Journal. While there, she led the award-winning 1992 investigation, “Unequal Protection,” on the disparity in environmental law enforcement against polluters in minority and white communities. Lavelle received her master’s degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and is a graduate of Villanova University.