Philadelphia EPA workers protest at City Hall, saying ‘clean water is under attack’ amid Trump’s cuts

Chris Day, 66, retired from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in May 2022, but on Tuesday he found himself outside the agency’s Center City office.

“We’re mission-driven to protect human health and the environment, and that’s what’s important to us, and that’s what we’re trying to do,” said Day, who was an EPA lawyer for 33 years. “So let us do our jobs.”

EPA workers and supporters of the federal workforce gathered in a “solidarity march” during their lunch break Tuesday afternoon in Philadelphia, joining a day of coordinated actions against the Trump administration’s recent shake-ups at the agency. The marches were organized by Council 238 of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the union representing EPA workers.

Demonstrators held signs that read “Save EPA!,” “Planet over profit,” and “I ♥ clean air.” The leader of a chant called out: “When clean water is under attack, what do we do?” The crowd responded: “Stand up. Fight back.”

“It was important for me to come out here, because it doesn’t really feel like the EPA should be a partisan division,” said Brodie Weigelt, whose partner is an EPA employee.

Weigelt added that the agency was created under President Richard Nixon. “Clean air and clean water is not a partisan issue,” he said.

The EPA shake-ups are part of a larger movement by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to shrink the federal workforce in a stated effort to cut government spending. On his first day in office, Trump signed several executive orders affecting federal workers that ordered a hiring freeze, an end to DEI initiatives, and a return to fully in-person work.

The administration has also encouraged workers to resign by offering buyouts, and asked them to send an email to show their accomplishments. Federal workers have been laid off in Philadelphia and across the country.

They include at least three Philadelphia-area EPA workers as of last month. An additional 14 local EPA employees performing environmental justice work had been put on leave before then, according to Brad Starnes, president of AFGE Local 3631.

Some fired probationary workers have been reinstated across agencies. Some of the EPA’s local environmental justice workers have been called back as well, Starnes noted, while some remain on leave in a “state of limbo.” The union still does not know if the briefly jobless probationary employees will get back pay, he added.

Starnes says members he represents in his bargaining unit generally are feeling “a lot of concern” and an “unsettling” sense.

“This is exponentially worse than anything we’ve ever experienced in the past. It’s hard,” he said.

The majority of EPA employees assigned to the Center City location were required to resume full-time in-office work on Monday, Starnes said. Non-bargaining employees had returned to the office already, and fully remote workers are expected to return on April 7, he noted.

The mandate “totally disregards or nullifies or rescinds the union-negotiated agreement,” Starnes said, and the union has filed a grievance.

“These workplace flexibilities allow workers to do their job, which they have been doing and will continue to do even in light of this change,” Starnes said.

Joyce Howell, executive vice president of AFGE Council 238, said she is concerned about plans to cut the EPA budget 65% and the impact that could have on the agency’s mission to protect drinking water and respond to pollution events, such as the SPS Technologies fire in Abington in February.

”The Delaware and the Schuylkill Rivers provide drinking water to 17 million people,” Howell noted while in front of City Hall, “and we protect that.”

She pointed to the ground and continued: “We have right here, underneath our feet, pipes taking water to buildings and taking waste out of buildings. All those pipes were probably put in with some type of grant from EPA or from the state’s revolving loan fund.”

Howell said she is also greatly concerned about any cuts to the EPA’s Office of Research and Development, the agency’s scientific arm. The office is bipartisan, Howell said, and came up with a way to analyze 15,000 chemical compounds under the PFAS family and create regulations for drinking water.

”It’s a tenuous balance between supplying clean drinking water to people from sources that are also used for industrial purposes, such as the Schuylkill, such as the Delaware River,” she said. “It’s a very complex science to figure out how much a body of water can absorb before it can’t serve its other purpose to support human health and the environment.”

While some fired federal workers have been reinstated, more workforce cuts are expected.

“Overall, there’s just this sense of uncertainty, just a continuous insult to us and the work that we do,” said Andrew Kreider, a congressional liaison for EPA Region 3 in Philadelphia. “We’ve got this sort of sword hanging over us that any one of us at any moment could be just told to go home. Those decisions are being made in Washington, D.C., and without regard to our performance.”

Agencies across the federal government were instructed to submit plans for “a significant reduction in the number of full-time equivalent (FTE) positions by eliminating positions that are not required” by March 13, according to a memo. White House officials are now reviewing those plans, Reuters reported.

“It’s a scary moment,” Starnes said about the forthcoming impact of the reduction-in-force plans at EPA. “That is not something we’re looking forward to.”