In Chicago, U.S. EPA workers protest Trump rollbacks

A crowd of more than 100 people, including workers from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, rallied Tuesday outside its regional headquarters in downtown Chicago to protest regulatory rollbacks as well as funding and personnel cuts ordered by President Donald Trump.

While the administration says it is spearheading government efficiency, current federal employees and the 1,000 probationary workers across several agencies who were fired in February are speaking out against the reductions.

Two weeks ago the national agency’s new administrator Lee Zeldin announced a series of deregulatory actions to “unleash American energy, lower costs for Americans, revitalize the American auto industry” by reviewing oil and gas industry regulations, clean air standards and more.

Ellie Hagen, an environmental scientist and part of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 704 union that represents U.S. EPA workers, said she’s concerned about how this change in direction will affect working-class Americans.

“We do not feel that these cuts would protect everyday people,” she said. “We feel that these cuts only seek to increase the profits (of) billionaires.”

To do her job as congressional liaison, Shannon Wolf said she took an oath to defend the Constitution and protect human health and the environment, including the air, land and water that sustain life. Wolf is also part of AFGE Local 704.

“And right now, that very fundamental work is being threatened. That puts every American at risk, their health, their safety. Red, blue, purple — it doesn’t matter. These risks, these cuts to our agency, are devastating for all Americans,” she said. “For a tiny fraction of the federal budget, we protect the Earth that we all live on, and there is no alternative option. I can’t think of any more efficient expenditure of funds than protecting the air that we breathe and the water that we drink.”

Debra Shore, who served as the agency’s regional administrator for the last 3 ½ years after being appointed by former President Joe Biden, said the quality of life in the country has improved in the last 55 years since the U.S. EPA was established. And taxpayers have reaped the fruit of that progress and of the work of civil servants.

“The American people, through our tax dollars, have made such an investment in the young people who were hired and were being trained to be inspectors and emergency responders and community outreach people and lawyers,” she said. “To toss that away merely because they had not served for a full year — that’s waste. That’s waste, of human capital and of an investment in young people.”

Shore called the administration’s actions “willful cruelty” toward civil servants with expert knowledge and a passion for protecting human health and the environment. “To dismiss them wholesale, without due process, without caring, is terrible, and no one deserves that,” she said.