Air Date: Week of July 4, 2025

Federal workers and labor allies rallied at Federal Plaza in Chicago on February 18, 2025 to protest the termination of Chicago-based EPA workers and other federal employees. (Photo: Paul Gyotte, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

In a rare act of public criticism, hundreds of EPA employees published a declaration of dissent from the agency’s policies under the Trump administration, calling out its alleged ignoring of scientific consensus to benefit polluters, undermining of public trust and more. David Cash led EPA’s Region One covering New England under the Biden Administration and shares his thoughts and opinions about the letter and the Trump EPA with Host Aynsley O’Neill.

Transcript

O’NEILL: In a rare act of public criticism, EPA employees published a declaration of dissent from the agency’s policies under the Trump administration. Hundreds of employees signed the letter with many choosing to remain anonymous. David Cash led EPA’s Region One covering New England under the Biden Administration. And he’s here to share his thoughts and opinions about the letter. David Cash, welcome back to Living on Earth!

CASH: It's good to be here again. Thanks.

O'NEILL: So, David, it seems like a lot of EPA employees are risking their careers to write this letter. Why would they do that?

CASH: Yeah, this is an extraordinary effort being made by these staff for a lot of different reasons. One, as you mentioned, this puts a target on their back in terms of retribution from within the administration, and we know that this administration will not hesitate to use retribution. But the other reason that I would love for your audience to hear is that these are dedicated career civil servants who, regardless of administration, administer the laws like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act guided by science and legal concerns, and they do it, regardless of what the politics are, they always are on the side of serving the American public. I've worked in government for a long time, and I cannot recall of a time when civil servants released a letter like this that put their jobs on the line and also called into question the actions of the administration that they work for. It shows an ultimate devotion to the public, because they're taking a lot of risks to raise an alarm and a very important alarm.

O'NEILL: And David, I understand you've had the chance to speak with a number of EPA employees who did sign the document. What did they have to say?

CASH: Clearly, this was a really difficult choice for them to make. One of them who actually left recently, his job, by the way, was to literally fly into communities that had just experienced, say, a wildfire or a toxic spill, and help bring that community back to normalcy, help clean up, help rebuild. And he said, "I still believe in the stated mission of EPA, but I don't believe in the actions of the agency will actually support that mission." This person felt like they could not continue working for this agency because it was not fulfilling the fundamental mission. Just to demonstrate the courage, another staff member I spoke to said, "My signing this may result in a threat to my job, but I feel there's a greater existential threat to the environment, to my child growing up, that EPA will no longer offer the safety net to communities when some kind of environmental hazard happens." So, very difficult for these staff members to make this choice to sign such a letter, but the threat to what they hold dear, that is, protecting human health and the environment is just too great for them to not make this kind of statement.

O'NEILL: I imagine that sentiment is shared amongst many, if not all, of the employees who, who also signed their names onto that letter.

CASH: I imagine that's true, and I imagine it's also held by many, many, many other employees who were too nervous to sign for fear of retribution.

O'NEILL: And now the letter outlines five main concerns. I want to go through a couple of those point by point. So one involves ignoring scientific consensus to benefit polluters. What do they mean by that?

CASH: EPA is a scientific organization. It's woven throughout the laws that EPA has to implement. We need to understand how pollution happens, how it can be cleaned up, the kind of public health impacts pollution can have, whether a pollutant causes cancer or asthma. Those are the kinds of things that undergird EPA actions. It's science. It's a scientific organization, always has held itself up to the highest standards of scientific integrity. And through a variety of decisions that are being made, some of them unlawful, like the freezing of funds to go to a variety of different pollution reduction programs, we are seeing science being pushed aside. We've seen, for example, an effort being made to essentially say that fossil fuels don't have a significant impact on climate change and on communities. And I know that this program has focused on the endangerment finding, which, you know, 15 years ago, legally and scientifically, it was found that climate change endangers public health and the environment. So we see an abandonment of science in those kinds of ways. But we also see it in, you know, follow the money, in the request for a reduction and essential elimination of the Office of Research, which is designed to provide the scientific backbone of EPA. Many of these actions will benefit the fossil fuel industry and polluting chemical industries, lower costs for them, and therefore impose costs on everybody else, right? They're often touted as, these are cost saving efforts, but maybe they save cost bottom line for some companies, but who pays? People who now pay greater health costs because their mother has cancer, or the family that can't go to work one day because they have to take their kid to the hospital because they're having an asthma attack. Those are costs that the companies don't put on their books, right? But the more we see these rollbacks that are not based on science, that's how people are going to pay. So that's what they mean by that.

O'NEILL: And one of the points that stood out to me a lot, David, was this idea that the EPA has been undermining public trust. What do you make of that?

CASH: EPA is a large federal agency, and I think, as we all know, it's hard for a large federal agency to gain the trust of communities and people, and over many administrations, efforts are made to regain that trust, and whether that's in how we invest our funds, so that communities feel direct benefits. By making those investments, we improve trust. When we do a regulation, we try to make sure everybody has a voice at the table, and that the regulations will benefit communities and also not cost too much. We're always trying to balance economic impact. So by reducing those kinds of programs, communities and people and families are going to feel like the government has let them down, that they can't trust the government to protect them in the face of increasing environmental impacts, that the government is stepping back to protect them from climate change, that the government is stepping back to stop bringing green jobs, solar panels to their schools, electric school busses to their school yards, all of those kinds of things that's going to decrease trust. And here's what's even more insidious, a lot of the language that has come from this current administration is designed specifically to sow that mistrust. So there have been accusations, for example, of waste, fraud and abuse that have had no evidence behind them. They've gone to court time and time again, and they have presented no evidence that there's been waste, fraud and abuse. Just by that being out there, by people seeing that on Instagram, by them hearing the President say that, or the administrator of EPA saying that that's going to decrease their trust.

O'NEILL: You know, lots of our listeners will likely be following along with this story, but for the average person who might not be keeping up with the ins and outs of the Environmental Protection Agency, why do you think that the average citizen should care about this?

CASH: I think there are two big reasons. First, there should be a big red flag that hundreds of federal employees who normally are not political, happy to work for Republican and Democrats are saying there's something fundamentally wrong with how this agency is being run. The second would be for this person to say, whoa. As I'm learning more about this, I'm now going to worry more about whether my water is clean. I'm going to worry more about whether my air is clean. I'm going to be frustrated that I was hoping to buy an electric vehicle and get some support from the government in terms of an incentive or tax break, and they're taking that away from me. Oh, I did hear that my school district had won an EPA grant to get a solar panel on their roof, and that's being taken away. Oh, I was looking at a job at this new HVAC company that was going to install new kinds of technologies, and I'm not going to get that job anymore. That's what average Americans should be thinking when they hear this kind of news.

O'NEILL: And I know that this letter has only just been released, but perhaps, what do you hope will come out of it?

CASH: Over the last six months, as we've seen rollbacks of regulation, as we've seen unlawful freezing of federal funds for grants, as we've seen the decimation of staff at these agencies. What I would hope is that with each thing, like a letter like this, or other ways that are being communicated to the American people, that the American people take a step back and really question how decisions are being made and work to assure that they will have clean water and clean air into the future, because these steps are going to result in the opposite of that.

O'NEILL: Dr. David Cash is the former EPA Administrator for Region One New England. Thank you so much as always, for joining us, Dr. Cash.

CASH: Thank you, Aynsley.

O’NEILL: After we spoke with David Cash, the EPA said it placed nearly 150 staffers who allegedly signed the letter on administrative leave, pending an investigation. EPA press secretary Brigit Hirsch said in a statement quoted by the Washington Post, “We have a ZERO tolerance policy for agency bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging, and undercutting the agenda of this administration as voted for by the great people of this country last November.”

 

Links

The Guardian | “EPA Employees Sign ‘Declaration of Dissent’ Over Agency Moves Under Trump”

Read the EPA employees’ letter of dissent.

WBUR | “Outgoing New England EPA Head Says Trump’s Environmental Agenda Is ‘Counter to the Values’ of U.S.”