Despite Spending Caps, EPA’s ‘Highest Budget in History’ Proposes Hiring More Than 2,000

The Biden administration’s $11 billion Fiscal Year 2025 (FY25) budget request for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) complies with last July’s Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA) in trimming $1 billion from its annual spending plan, yet somehow still calls for hiring 2,023 new employees.

“I am astounded by this proposed increase” in the agency’s workforce even under FRA spending caps, said Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), chair of the House Appropriations Committee’s Interior, Environment and Related Agencies Subcommittee during a 90-minute April 30 review of EPA’s proposed FY25 budget.

The manpower boost is needed to explain and enforce an ever-growing array of new regulations and rules, such as four EPA released last week regarding coal-fired power plants and those adopted in 2021 and 2022 related to methane emissions, air and water quality monitoring, he said.

“This is a glaring sign of the agency’s priorities,” Mr. Simpson said. “When the agency is forced to request less, it chooses to take hits to programs that go directly to our states, local governments, and tribes” because it is essentially planting its flag in issues states have regulatory responsibility to manage.

Rep. Jake Ellzey (R-Texas) said the proposed staffing boost is geared to sidestepping states, claiming the EPA under the Biden administration has “become a super Congress, a super governor in our federalist system” and such regulatory expansion needs to be checked.

He cited the EPA’s new rules regarding per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), chemicals used to make fluoropolymer coatings, oil, stains, and grease.

“We have elected officials in our states and our cities and our legislatures that do this job,” Mr. Ellzey said. “We have our own agencies in Texas, which do a great job of doing this. And you have tried taking extraordinary power, which is not granted by Congress and only by executive order, not by law. to do the things you’re doing.”

Mr. Simpson noted that even with the FRA-compliant cuts, the proposed EPA budget at $10.994 billion is still $1.8 billion, or 20 percent above FY24’s “enacted level,” making it “the highest level of funding for the EPA in history.”

He said the agency already has $100 billion in earmarks from “several large spending packages outside of the annual appropriations process,” including the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) and 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

Already with the relatively small amounts allocated “the agency has hired an additional 1,200 employees using this supplemental funding,” Mr. Simpson said, which raises questions because when BIL and IRA funding ends, these positions will still be on the payroll.

“I am concerned that the agency is going to be pinning Congress to a hiring cliff down the road,” he said, again questioning the manpower boost in a budget that “proposes to reduce or eliminate many bipartisan popular programs and grants that go directly to states, tribes, and local governments.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan said the additional 2,000 employees are needed to meet growing demand for expertise and interaction with state officials and industry groups, and “to advance our vital mission of protecting human health and the environment, championing environmental justice, and tackling the climate crisis.”

The EPA regulates more than 1.2 million facilities and a wide range of products, from automobiles to pesticides, he testified, with an additional $770 million and 200 more positions dedicated to its 3,430-employee Office of Enforcement and Compliance.

In addition, Mr. Regan said, the FY25 budget request seeks an additional $67.3 million and 128 new employees “to address the most serious environmental violations … protect communities from coal combustion residuals, address hazardous air pollution, provide for clean and safe drinking water, and reduce the risk of deadly chemical accidents.”

The staffing increase is necessary, Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) said. “Not only has the need for EPA’s expertise expanded tremendously over the last decade, but the growing challenges around climate change require more expertise and more staff,” she said.

Questioning ‘Environmental Justice’

Mr. Ellzey, Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.), who served as Interior Secretary in the Trump administration, and Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-N.C.) questioned the administration’s commitment to “environmental justice” when it is imposing regulatory burdens on the nation’s industries while China continues to be the world’s biggest polluter as part of a “green energy” push that is reliant of critical minerals and metals produced by China.

Mr. Ellzey referred to a photo of a child hauling a sack along a muddy track that he said was at a Chinese-owned lithium mine in Africa. He noted with irony that while the administration is touting “environmental justice” as a “green energy” priority, its own anti-mining regulations ensure reliance on China in securing critical minerals needed to meet an “EPA EV [electric vehicle] mandate,” and enforces China’s reliance on child labor in Africa mining sites.

“This seems like it conflicts with your equity action plan because we’re outsourcing our sin,” he said. “It’s almost like we act like when China pollutes the air, that it just stays over China. It doesn’t. It falls over the United States. So, while we are harming American jobs, American production and American national security. We are also violating the very tenets of what you have said is very important to you as administrator of the EPA, and that is ‘environmental justice.’

“This is not a picture of ‘environmental justice,’” Mr. Ellzey said, pointing to the photo. “Does this not conflict with your equity action plan?”

“The question is ridiculous,” Mr. Regan replied. “All of us agree and think child labor is abhorrent. Okay? Number one. Number two, there is no such thing as an ‘EPA EV mandate.’”

How many of the new 2,023 EPA staffers will be working on climate change initiatives, Mr. Edwards asked.

Mr. Regan said there is no easy way to answer that. The agency is “really ramping up” in hiring “skill sets are very hard to ascertain” to develop “technology-based standards” to regulate  greenhouse gases, he said, which is a responsibility across the agency .

The staffing boost will bring “co-benefits” and is being requested by industry, he said, which needs “technology standards in a way that [they] can make investments, long-term investments.”

Mr. Edwards, noting the EPA’s 17,000 workforce currently has about 700 vacancies, asked, “Wouldn’t it make sense, before you ask for 2,000 more employees, to fill the 700 that you’ve already got appropriation for?”

“That’s the number [of vacancies] we have today but we have people going out and coming in,” Mr. Regan said. “Obviously, there’s some matriculation going on. So it’s not necessarily a full 700 people on every given day.”

He said the monitoring environment is growing increasingly complex and that industry relies on the EPA to provide data it needs to comply witty regulations.

“EPA is trying to grow itself, is developing the technological capabilities we know we’re going to need,” Mr. Regan said, “So, we have to do a better job in how we protect public health.”