WASHINGTON (AP) \u2014 The Environmental Protection Agency was already reeling from massive staff cuts and dramatic shifts in priority and policy. A government shutdown raises new questions about how it can carry out its founding mission of protecting America\u2019s health and environment with little more than skeletal staff and funding.<\/p>\n
In President Donald Trump\u2019s second term, the EPA has leaned hard into an agenda of deregulation and facilitating Trump\u2019s boosting of fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal to meet what he has called an energy emergency.<\/p>\n
Jeremy Symons, a former EPA policy official under President Bill Clinton, said it\u2019s natural to worry that a shutdown will lead \u201cthe worst polluters\u201d to treat it as a chance to dump toxic pollution without getting caught.<\/p>\n
\u201cNobody will be holding polluters accountable for what they dump into the air we breathe, in the water we drink while EPA is shut down,\u201d said Symons, now a senior adviser to the Environmental Protection Network, a group of former agency officials advocating for a strong Earth-friendly department.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis administration has already been implementing a serial shutdown of EPA,\u201d Symons said. \u201cWhittling away at EPA\u2019s ability to do its job.\u201d<\/p>\n
A scientific study of pollution from about 200 coal-fired power plants during the 2018-2019 government shutdown found they \u201csignificantly increased their particulate matter emissions due to the EPA\u2019s furlough.\u201d Soot pollution is connected to thousands of deaths per year in the United States.<\/p>\n
The birth of EPA<\/p>\n
The EPA was created under Republican President Richard Nixon in 1970 amid growing fears about pollution of the planet\u2019s air, land and water. Its first administrator, William D. Ruckelshaus, spoke of the need for an \u201cenvironmental ethic\u201d in his first speech.<\/p>\n
\u201cEach of us must begin to realize our own relationship to the environment,\u201d Ruckelshaus said. \u201cEach of us must begin to measure the impact of our own decisions and actions on the quality of air, water, and soil of this nation.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the time since then, it has focused on safeguarding and cleaning up the environment, and over the past couple of decades, it also added fighting climate change to its charge.<\/p>\n
EPA\u2019s job is essentially setting up standards for what\u2019s healthy for people and the environment, giving money to state and local governments to get that done and then coming down as Earth\u2019s police officer if it isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
\u201cProtecting human health and the environment is critical to the country\u2019s overall well-being,\u201d said Christine Todd Whitman, who was EPA chief under Republican President George W. Bush. \u201cAnything that stops that regulatory process puts us at a disadvantage and endangers the public.\u201d<\/p>\n
WATCH: How a White House plan to overturn a key EPA regulation threatens children\u2019s health<\/a><\/p>\n But priorities change with presidential administrations.<\/p>\n Earlier this year, Trump\u2019s new EPA chief Lee Zeldin unveiled five pillars for the agency. The first is to ensure clean air, land and water. Right behind it is to \u201crestore American energy dominance,\u201d followed by environmental permitting reform, making U.S. the capital of artificial intelligence and protecting American auto jobs.<\/p>\n Zeldin is seeking to rescind a 2009 science-based finding that climate change is a threat to America\u2019s health and well-being. Known as the \u201cendangerment\u201d finding, it forms the foundation of a range of rules that limit pollution from cars, power plants and other sources. Zeldin also has proposed ending a requirement that large, mostly industrial polluters report their planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, canceled billions of dollars in solar energy grants and eliminated a research and development division.<\/p>\n Agency\u2019s shutdown plan<\/p>\n The EPA\u2019s shutdown contingency plan, first written a decade ago and slightly updated for this year, says 905 employees are considered essential because they are necessary to protect life and property or because they perform duties needed by law. An additional 828 employees can keep working because they aren\u2019t funded by the annual federal budget and instead get their pay from fees and such.<\/p>\n EPA officials won\u2019t say how many employees they have cut \u2014 former officials now at the Environmental Protection Network say it\u2019s 25% \u2014 but the Trump administration\u2019s budget plan says the agency now has 14,130 employees, down 1,000 from a year ago. The administration is proposing cutting that to 12,856 in this upcoming budget year and Zeldin has talked of going to levels of around Ronald Reagan\u2019s presidency, which started at around 11,000.<\/p>\n The agency\u2019s shutdown plan calls for it to stop doing non-criminal pollution inspections needed to enforce clean air and water rules. It won\u2019t issue new grants to other governmental agencies, update its website, issue new permits, approve state requests dealing with pollution regulations or conduct most scientific research, according to the EPA document. Except in situations where the public health would be at risk, work on Superfund cleanup sites will stop.<\/p>\n