March 25 (UPI) — Environmental Protection Agency workers from coast to coast devoted their lunch hours Tuesday to protecting planned cuts to reduce the size and scope of the federal agency.
Protests were held in New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago and many other large cities housing EPA offices and other facilities and are billed as a “National Day of Action.”
The EPA workers are protesting funding cuts, downsizing and reductions in regulatory scope imposed by the Trump administration.
The Philadelphia EPA protest was held outside the federal agency’s office at 4 Penn Plaza in Philadelphia’s Center City and involved members of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 3631.
“This is about our morale,” AFGE congressional liaison Andrew Kreider told CBS News.
“We are characterized by some members of the administration as lazy or ineffective,” Kreider said. “We want to counter that narrative and remind each other of the good work we do every day.”
He said the protests also make respective community members aware of potential EPA downsizing and how it might affect them.
He cited a recent cancellation of a $1 million federal grant for Philadelphia’s Office of Sustainability as an example of local impacts of EPA downsizing.
The grant was to help the city prepare for extreme weather events, Kreider said.
Boston participants in the EPA workers’ National Day of Action called the event a “solidarity march against the onslaught of attacks on the agency by the Trump administration,” WCVB reported.
Officials with AFGE Council 238 organized the Boston protest and said it included engineers, biologists, chemists scientists and others who “work every day to ensure that Americans across the country have access to clean air and drinking water.”
They said the EPA “plays a crucial role in responding to climate disasters by providing expertise in environmental protection.”
“We are concerned that our mission is in jeopardy from budget cuts from the Trump administration,” AFGE Local 3428 vice president Jack Melcher told WCVB.
In New York City, more than 100 EPA workers picketed during their respective lunch breaks at the Federal Plaza in Manhattan.
“We’re fighting for keeping federal employees in their offices doing their jobs, making sure that we’re protecting the environment,protecting the air, protecting the land [and] protecting the water,” EPA employee and AFGE Local 3911 president Ed Guster told The City.
Protests also were held in Chicago, Dallas and many other large cities as EPA administrator Lee Zeldin seeks to eliminate waste of taxpayer dollars.
Zeldin on March 10 announced the cancellation of more than 400 federal grants totaling $1.7 billion across nine programs that he said are unnecessary.
Those cuts are being challenged in federal courts, along with others announced by Zeldin, including reducing the EPA’s workforce by at least 1,000 workers.
The reductions are to “rein in wasteful federal spending,” Zeldin said.
“It is our commitment at EPA to be exceptional steward of tax dollars,” Zeldin said.
Such cuts include cancelling a $50 million grant made by the Biden administration to Climate Justice Alliance, which says, “climate justice travels through a free Palestine,” according to the EPA.
Zeldin also froze $20 billion that he said was distributed by the Biden administration to a Washington, D.C.-area bank during a rush to quickly distribute the funds before Trump was sworn in as president on Jan. 20.
“This scheme was the first of its kind in EPA history and it was purposefully designed to obligate all of the money in a rush job with reduced oversight,” Zeldin said. “There will be zero tolerance of waste and abuse.”