'The purge has begun.' Environmental justice workers locked out of EPA Seattle office

Nine Environmental Protection Agency employees in Seattle have been put on leave by the Trump Administration because they work on environmental justice.

Their jobs involve helping communities that breathe, eat, and drink more than their fair share of pollution.

Communities near major pollution sources like airports, factories, and oil refineries often have higher proportions of people of color, lower incomes, and shorter-than-average lifespans.

On Monday, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced that the agency had put 160 employees who work on environmental justice and 11 who work on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility on leave.

“The previous Administration used DEI and Environmental Justice to advance ideological priorities, distributing billions of dollars to organizations in the name of climate equity,” Zeldin said in a press release. “This ends now.”

Zeldin’s statement said EPA “will be good stewards of tax dollars and do everything in our power to deliver clean air, land, and water to every American, regardless of race, religion, background, and creed.”

EPA officials did not respond to interview requests for this story.

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“The purge has begun at EPA,” said former agency employee Helen Bottcher.

Bottcher retired from the Seattle office in 2023 and has been volunteering with the employees’ union, the American Federation of Government Employees, Local 1110.

Bottcher said the nine employees were locked out of their Seattle offices and electronic access to EPA systems on Thursday.

EPA’s Seattle office is the agency’s headquarters for the region encompassing Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington.

Bottcher said the nine employees are still being paid for now, but they have “no idea” if they are going to be fired, demoted, or moved to a different job or location.

“It's just chaos,” she said. “And I think the chaos is intentional. It's designed, engineered, to make people afraid, to break people's spirits, and to divide them.”

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Bottcher said the nine were mostly involved in issuing and monitoring grants to local organizations pursuing environmental justice goals.

The agency’s retreat from environmental justice work is not limited to grants.

Under the Biden administration, employees throughout EPA were instructed to prioritize the hardest-hit communities in their work.

A free tool called EJSCREEN that EPA and other agencies, including the Washington State Department of Transportation, used to identify inequities in pollution and the harms it causes has been removed from EPA’s internal and external computer networks, according to an employee who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution.

“We've been directed to halt any consideration of EJ [environmental justice] in our work,” the employee told KUOW. “Completely dropping EJ from our daily work is a complete 180 from the last administration.”

In 2024, environmental justice grants from the EPA to Washington state organizations included:

• $20 million to build two cooling centers/clean air refuges in Okanagan County.

• $20 million to apply “conservation harvest and wildfire prevention techniques” on 3,000 acres of Yakama Nation forest.

• $19.9 million to install heat pumps and increase climate resilience in low-income communities in the Spokane area.

• $3 million to train community leaders and conduct “community assemblies” in disadvantaged communities in Washington state.

Bottcher said EPA employees are still trying to do their jobs even as they live in fear of the administration’s next steps.

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Russel Vought, now head of the Office of Management and Budget, said in a private 2023 speech reported by ProPublica in October 2024. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.”

"That is an insane way to talk about a workforce that we all rely on for some absolutely essential services," U.S. Sen. Patty Murray said Tuesday.

“The agency is not broken yet, but boy, it feels like the wrecking ball is at the door,” Bottcher said. “We need to save our government.”