The Environmental Protection Agency lost more than 4,000 employees in the first year of Trump's second term, bringing its staffing down to 12,849, a level not seen since the Reagan administration, according to a March 6, 2026 Inside Climate News analysis of Office of Personnel Management workforce data. That is a 24% reduction between January 2025 and January 2026, more than double the rate of losses across the federal workforce. Federal News Network, citing the latest federal workforce data for fiscal 2025 to 2026, put the reduction at about 3,000 employees, roughly a fifth of the workforce; the two counts cover different periods.
The losses ran deepest among experienced and specialized staff. Inside Climate News found proportionately greater reductions among employees with doctorate degrees, team leaders and those in health occupations, a category that includes public health experts. The almost 2,000 staff who left the roster at the end of 2025, largely through voluntary and early retirements, had a median 30.3 years of service, compared with 10.8 years for those who remain. The cuts largely carried out EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin's plan to eliminate the agency's Office of Research and Development, even though Congress directed the agency in its January appropriations law to “maintain staffing levels in order to fulfill the mission and statutory obligations of the agency.”
An EPA spokesperson said the agency had “undertaken a strategic restructuring” grounded in “gold-standard science.” Former officials disagreed. “You can't replace them with junior people who have just joined EPA,” said Betsy Southerland, a former director of EPA's Office of Science and Technology. In March, the EPA's inspector general found the agency had shed too many employees to manage its grants portfolio, Government Executive reported; the agency answered that grant spending would shrink.
The staffing cuts came weeks after the EPA, on February 12, 2026, rescinded the 2009 Clean Air Act “endangerment finding,” the basis for much of the federal government's climate regulation, including rules on power plants, vehicles and oil and gas methane. Zeldin called it “the single largest act of deregulation in the history of the United States of America.”
Correction (October 2, 2026): The entry said departing staff had a median 30.3 years of service; that figure applies to the almost 2,000 staff who left at the end of 2025, not all departures. It said experienced staff were “specifically targeted”; the data show proportionately greater losses, not a documented targeting decision. It described the endangerment finding as the basis for all federal climate regulation and as still being eliminated; NPR describes it as the basis for much of that regulation, and the rescission was finalized in February 2026. The “largest deregulatory action” quote was attributed to the White House; the verified quote is Zeldin's. The title's claim that scientists were “replaced by nobody” was not supported and was removed.