This Ain’t The Apprentice. Stop Calling Them Firings. They’re Purges.

Posted on by David Kurtz

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

A Purge By Another Name Is Still A Purge

As we come to the end of the third century week of the second Trump presidency, I want to highlight a failure of language that is subverting the coverage of the lawlessness. It’s so pervasive that you may not have noticed it, and it may already have creeped into the conceptual framework you’re building in your own mind to help explain what is happening in Trump II.

It’s about the purges of civil service employees throughout the federal government.

There is really no such thing as unilateral mass “firings” or “layoffs” in the federal government, and yet most of the coverage headlines Trump’s purges using exactly those words. Unilateral is the key there. Congress can pass laws to cut funding, to eliminate positions, to zero out programs, but it hasn’t. The president is doing this on his own in contravention of the laws Congress has already passed to fund these positions and to give them civil service protections.

Calling them “firings” or “layoffs” when Congress hasn’t voted on them in any way shape or form isn’t just imprecise; it concedes way too much. It bestows a powerfulness and a decisiveness on Trump that he neither has nor deserves. It gives the purges a conclusory gloss of lawfulness when the lawlessness is the whole point.

“Firings” and “layoffs” belong to a different body of language. They’re imported from business and pasted haphazardly on what is going on here. You may have also seen “hostile takeover” imported from the business world. Likewise, the misnomer “buyout” has been used to describe the dubious effort to encourage government workers to retire immediately even though no business would recognize the offer terms as amounting to a buyout.

Business terms provide a totally wrong conceptual framework for the purges underway. The misuse of the terms in turn makes the outcries over what is happening seem to casual observers like what you’d expect with corporate downsizing – self-interested parties decrying what is happening to them – instead of a broader reaction to the multi-front assault of the rule of law.

We may not have an alternative body of language that offers terms as striking and clear in our own minds as firings and layoffs. But if we focus on the power dynamic, on the unilateral component, and on the lawlessness, it may help us refine the language we use which in turn fine tunes our thinking.

In the meantime, “purge” is a splendid word.

The Purge Spreads Across Government

Among the latest developments:

  • WSJ: EPA Begins to Put Environmental-Justice Workers On Leave
    WaPo: Trump moves to shutter environmental offices across the government
  • WSJ: White House Preparing Order to Cut Thousands of Federal Health Workers
  • NYT: “The Trump administration plans to reduce the number of workers at the U.S. Agency for International Development from more than 10,000 to about 290 positions, three people with knowledge of the plans said on Thursday.”

Trump Purports To Fire FEC Chair

Trump is not empowered to fire the FEC chair, but he’s trying to do so anyway. FEC Chair Ellen Weintraub says she’s considering her options.

Judge Blocks Trump-Musk Bogus Retirement Offer

A federal judge in Massachusetts has temporarily blocked the Trump-Musk push to encourage the immediate retirement of federal workers.

The New Symbol Of The Resistance: 🥄

Workers at GSA mocked the “Fork in the Road” email – Trump’s bogus immediate retirement offer – by raining down spoon emojis in a group chat during a video meeting. By the next day, they noticed that the spoon emoji had been removed from their videoconferencing platform.

Trump Does Not Have The Authority To Abolish USAID

In a new report, the Congressional Research Service says very clearly what we already know about Trump’s unlawful attack on USAID: “Because Congress established USAID as an independent establishment within the executive branch, the President does not have the authority to abolish it; congressional authorization would be required to abolish, move, or consolidate USAID.”

America’s Epic Self-Own

Samantha Power, who may go down as the last real administrator of USAID, on Trump’s lawless dismantling of the independent agency: “We are witnessing one of the worst and most costly foreign policy blunders in U.S. history.”

Real World Impacts Of Trump’s USAID Sabotage

Again, we know the destruction is the point:

  • NYT: Foreign Aid Freeze Leaves Millions Without H.I.V. Treatment
  • WaPo: Gutting USAID threatens billions of dollars for U.S. farms
  • NYT: The stop-work order on USAID-funded research has left thousands of people around the world with experimental drugs and devices in their bodies, with no access to monitoring or care.

Who Let The DOGE Out?

Despite the public outcry, Elon Musk’s DOGE team continues to fan out across government:

100% On Brand

WSJ:

A key DOGE staff member who gained access to the Treasury Department’s central-payments system resigned Thursday after he was linked to a deleted social-media account that advocated racism and eugenics.

Marko Elez, a 25-year-old who is part of a cadre of Elon Musk lieutenants deployed by the Department of Government Efficiency to scrutinize federal spending, resigned after The Wall Street Journal asked the White House about his connection to the account.

Quote Of The Day

John Ganz, on groyperfication:

… every single person under say, the age of 40 on the right is exposed to extremely high levels of groyper content every day in group chats, on their social media timelines, in discord chats, etc. Groyperism totally suffuses the cultural environment of the right. While mainstream media is still chasing after master figures and hidden intellectuals shaping elite consensus, the real story is that young righties look at the opinions and trends among the groypers as being far more interesting and important than respectable intellectuals. Many young righties in staff and media positions are essentially groypers or seek to emulate them as much as possible.

The Hackiest Hack Who Ever Did Hack

DC acting U.S. Attorney Ed Martin never disappoints for sheer buffoonery. After the colossal fail of dismissing Jan. 6 charges against a defendant he was still representing, the court clerk notified him that he can’t withdraw from the case because he failed to renew his admissions and is not in good standing in DC federal court.

The federal court in D.C. says the U.S. attorney cannot move to withdraw from the case in which he, as a prosecutor, dismissed the case against a January 6 rioter he represented as a defense lawyer. He is "not in good standing" with the federal court here, having not renewed his admission.

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— Brad Heath (@bradheath.bsky.social) February 6, 2025 at 12:08 PM

TPM On TV

TPM's own @kateriga.bsky.social appeared on @thebeat.msnbc.com this evening to discuss Trump's rhetoric vs. reality.

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— TPM (@tpm.bsky.social) February 5, 2025 at 7:04 PM

Making Sense Of It All

Brian Beutler offers a structured approach for how to triage the Trump transgressions.

A House Called Tomorrow

At the end of another hard week, perhaps you’ll find some solace as I did when a friend sent me this soul-nourishing poem by Alberto Rios. An excerpt:

You are made, fundamentally, from the good.
With this knowledge, you never march alone.

You are the breaking news of the century.
You are the good who has come forward

Through it all, even if so many days
Feel otherwise.

…

All in service to a simple idea:

That we can make a house called tomorrow.
What we bring, finally, into the new day, every day,

Is ourselves.  And that’s all we need
To start.  That’s everything we require to keep going. 

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Here’s What Treasury and DOJ Mean By ‘Read-Only’ Access

Posted on by Josh Marshall

One of the continuing mysteries about the DOGE intrusion into the super sensitive payments computer system housed at the Treasury Department is just what Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent as well as other administration officials and lawyers mean by “read-only” access. For starters, it’s not clear that “read-only” is actually a privilege level on the systems in question. But that’s kind of a technical detail. More importantly, both Wired and TPM have independently reported that now-defenestrated DOGE operative Marko Elez in fact had administrator-level privileges on the same system. In other words, not “read only,” but full access to do pretty much anything if they chose to. And that’s not what people are thinking when they hear “read-only.” So what is it? Are the Treasury Secretary or the DOJ lawyers who went into court lying? Is there some technicality we’re not thinking of?

Continue reading “Here’s What Treasury and DOJ Mean By ‘Read-Only’ Access” →

Dems Suggest They Got Johnson To Commit To Hearing On Elon’s Treasury Break-In

Posted on by Nicole LaFond

Two Democratic members of Congress sent a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) Thursday in what appears to be a public attempt to remind the speaker to act on some sort of in-person commitment he apparently made to the two Democratic members of the House Ways and Means Committee during a closed-door conversation Wednesday.

Continue reading “Dems Suggest They Got Johnson To Commit To Hearing On Elon’s Treasury Break-In” →

Where’s the Real Power Nexus? How Does the Opposition Get To It?

Posted on by Josh Marshall

I’ve made this point a few times in passing in other posts. But as events develop I wanted to explain it succinctly and with emphasis. Democrats are out of power and have very few actual levers to impact what’s happening. Yelling is important. Driving opposition in what is ultimately a battle for public opinion is important. Contesting everything through the courts is important. But there is only one hard lever of power currently available: that’s the help the White House needs from Democrats on a budget and the debt ceiling. This morning explainer from Punchbowl makes clear why that help is essential. It’s not just helpful. It’s essential. The GOP majorities are simply too small, especially in the House. The GOP is simply too fractious.

Continue reading “Where’s the Real Power Nexus? How Does the Opposition Get To It?” →

Why Did Musk Gizmocrats Rewrite the Payment System Code?

Posted on by Josh Marshall

The Times this morning has an apparent explanation for why DOGE operatives were so eager to take control of the unified government payment system at the Treasury: they wanted to be able to shut off payments to USAID projects without going through USAID personnel. They say this is based on emails between Elon-backed Trump appointees now at Treasury. I assume this is accurate in itself but I wouldn’t be sure this is the only reason and perhaps not even the main reason. But it’s the only non-speculative explanation we have so far.

David Kurtz notes this morning that the judge overseeing a lawsuit aimed at halting the actions at Treasury is almost certainly being given false information about what’s actually happening, though as David notes we can’t say for certain the Justice Department lawyers representing the administration are affirmatively lying. (They may use weasel words; they may not themselves know; many possibilities.) Those lawyers continue to insist that the Musk operatives at Treasury only have “read-only” access to the computers. As Wired and I have independently reported, that’s not true. They have full administrator privileges and, as I have reported, they’ve already altered the code.

Continue reading “Why Did Musk Gizmocrats Rewrite the Payment System Code?” →

What Was Elon Musk’s Team Really Up To At Treasury?

Posted on by David Kurtz

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

Editor’s Note

Hello to all of the new Morning Memo readers. Since Trump’s second inaugural, a surge of about 1,500 new people have signed up to receive Morning Memo via email. Welcome!

A quick note on what Morning Memo is and is not. It doesn’t seek to be comprehensive but rather essential: It won’t waste your time with fluff or sensationalize. It’s a carefully curated selection of the day’s news with some long-running threads on particular areas of interest. It stays abreast of the news, but tries not to lose the big picture in the flurry of daily headlines.

That said, the Morning Memo you’ve seen over the past three weeks or so as been a little different than usual simply because there has been so … much … essential … news. It’s been hard to cram it all in and not lose the thread in this chaotic, unprecedented time. I suspect that the current intensity level will eventually subside somewhat and Morning Memo will return to being a little more digestible so that you walk away feeling like you’ve done your duty to be a well-informed citizen without losing yourself to doom-scrolling.

Is A Federal Judge Getting The Whole Story On Musk?

A lot of new reporting this morning on what Elon Musk’s team has been up to at Treasury. The substance of it matters for what are obvious reasons, and I’ll get to that in a moment.

But there’s important new context in which this is happening: The Justice Department is making representations in court to a federal judge in DC about what has and had not occurred at Treasury, and the judge is relying on those representations to issue a temporary restraining order to try to lock in the previous status quo.

It is not at all clear that what DOJ is telling the judge is accurate or complete. Whether that’s because the judge hasn’t asked the right questions or the Justice Department lawyers haven’t been given complete information from Treasury or everyone is operating from a deficiency of technical knowledge, there are plausible explanations that stop well short of outright lying or deceit. But whether it’s bad information or nefariousness, the stakes are a lot higher with an active court case on the matter pending.

Much of the confusion comes down to Treasury’s repeated claim that Musk team members designated as “special employees” have only had “read-only” access to sensitive payment systems. Without getting into technical details that are over my head, it seems increasingly likely that to whatever extent that is true, it doesn’t necessarily tell the whole story.

As Wired and TPM have reported, the Muskovites have been working on changing the underlying code that the payments systems run on. The most important new overnight reporting comes from the NYT, which says that the reason Musk’s team wanted to get access to the Treasury payment system in the first place was to cut off USAID payments at the source:

But emails reviewed by The New York Times show that the Treasury’s chief of staff originally pushed for Tom Krause, a software executive affiliated with Mr. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, to receive access to the closely held payment system so that the Treasury could freeze U.S. Agency for International Development payments. …

The emails viewed by The Times undercut the Treasury’s explanation for why Mr. Krause and his team were given access to the payment system last week.

A reasonable read of the judge’s TRO is that it’s mostly targeted at limiting access to the database that contains records of the payments and sensitive payee information. It’s not clear that it would keep Musk’s flunkies from blocking payments, rewriting code, or meddling with the payment system while still being limited to “read-only access.”

What’s Musk Up To At OPM?

New from the WaPo:

Agents of billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have gained access to highly restricted government records on millions of federal employees — including Treasury and State Department officials in sensitive security positions — as part of a broader effort to wrest control over the government’s main personnel agency, according to four U.S. officials with knowledge of the developments.

Other New Developments On The Musk Takeover

  • The Guardian goes inside the USAID standoff on the night the DOGE team tried to infiltrate secure spaces holding sensitive and classified data.
  • The DOGE team has gotten access to key payment and contracting systems at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the WSJ reports.
  • The DOGE team has arrived at the Labor Department and CDC.
  • Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) is trying to establish whether DOGE is planning to load the sensitive Treasury payment data onto outside servers to employ artificial intelligence on it, Greg Sargent reports.
  • Musk et al. have zeroed in on the obscure Technology Transformation Services section of the General Services Administration, the WaPo reports.

Bondi Gets Right To Work Weaponizing DOJ

In a blizzard of some 14 memos, newly confirmed Attorney General Pam Bondi set the Justice Department on a perilous new course. Among the most directives:

  • investigate former Special Counsel Jack Smith;
  • de-emphasize FARA enforcement; and
  • serve President Trump as “his lawyers,” a devastating blow to DOJ independence and its prior historic role.

Inside The FBI’s Standoff With DOJ

  • WSJ: How Trump’s Sweeping Expulsions Have Thrown the FBI Into Chaos
  • Fox News: Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove accused Acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll of “insubordination.”
  • READ: Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove memo ordering the FBI purge

Only The Best

Acting DC U.S. Attorney Ed Martin is a piece of work:

Left: Interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin dismisses Jan. 6 case of Jose Padilla on Jan. 21, 2025 Right: Interim US Attorney Ed Martin seeks withdraw as Padilla’s counsel of record on Feb. 5, 2025 He signed a dismissal for a client he was still recorded as representing.

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— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney.bsky.social) February 5, 2025 at 8:55 PM

It’s No Better On The National Security Side

  • CIA: In a “counterintelligence disaster,” the White House ordered the CIA to send via unclassified email a list of all employees hired by the spy agency over the last two years, the NYT reports.
  • Army: In response to the anti-DEI executive order, West Point has banned existing student clubs at the service academy with any whiff of ethnic or cultural affinity.
  • Coast Guard: Reportedly on orders from President Trump, fired Coast Guard Commandant Linda Fagan was evicted from her home Tuesday on three-hours notice and forced to leave her personal belongings behind, NBC News reports.

Judge Blocks Birthright Citizenship Executive Order

In an opinion issued late yesterday, a federal judge in Maryland has blocked President Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order nationwide. For more context, Marty Lederman examines the most indefensible aspects of the government’s position in the case.

Trump Essentially Makes It Illegal To Be Trans

The degree to which transgender Americans are not just being vilified and stripped of legal status and protection but denied the ability to even exist makes it perhaps the most egregious attack on civil rights we’ve yet witnessed. The trans attacks are coming on so many fronts that it’s hard to keep track, but with Trump’s new executive order banning trans women from sports, here are two decent overviews:

  • WSJ: Trump’s Lightning-Speed Rollback of Transgender Rights Sparks Lawsuits
  • WaPo: Trump’s new ban on athletes is latest attack on transgender policies

For more granular day-to-day coverage of the legal landscape for trans rights, Chris Geidner at Law Dork is an experienced and indispensable reporter.

Quote Of The Day

“Today, right now, right here, is the easiest moment to draw the line against Donald Trump. Every day from here, it will get harder — the politics more inevitable, the destruction more irreversible, the sheer waste more costly, the downstream impacts on American life and the world beyond more catastrophic. The challenge is that fact has also been true every day for the last nine years.”–Garrett Graff

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The Three-Headed Chimera of Trumpian Destruction

Posted on by Josh Marshall

As Elon Musk and Donald Trump, in a secondary role, steamroll through the federal government, there’s a taxonomy to the players that is important to understand. It’s semi-hidden at the moment. But you can see it showing up if you look up close and it will likely become more visible over time.

There are three big factions operating in Trump’s government with currently overlapping but very distinct aims and strategies. First, you have MAGA, which wants to punish and displace the people who made life hard for Trump in his first term and replace them with loyalists. That’s mostly about power and personal fealty to Trump. Ideology is mostly secondary to the core aim. Second, you have Christian nationalists who want to seize the power of the state to execute a top down re-traditionalization of American society and culture. Russell Vought is key to this group. The basic theory goes back into the aughts, when a faction of conservatives decided (essentially a counsel of despair) that they had lost control of American culture and that state power was required to get it back. Third are people like Elon Musk who want to radically hollow out the government, outsource its functions and replace many of those functions with novel technologies — AI, cryptocurrency, etc. This is a mix of Silicon Valley “move fast and break things” business culture combined with “dark enlightenment” Yarvinian degenerate thought.

Continue reading “The Three-Headed Chimera of Trumpian Destruction” →

‘We Feel Terrorized’: What EPA Employees Say About The Decision To Stay Or Go Under Trump

Posted on by John Light

This story first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

In the face of the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to reshape the Environmental Protection Agency and drive out its workers, more than 300 career employees have left their jobs since the election, according to a ProPublica analysis of personnel data.

The numbers account for a relatively small share of the overall workforce at the EPA, but those who have departed include specialist civil servants crucial to its mission: toxicologists, lawyers, engineers, biologists, toxic waste specialists, emergency workers, and water and air quality experts.

Gary Jonesi made the decision to leave on election night. An attorney who helped enforce environmental laws for almost 40 years, he had loved working for the agency under both Democratic and Republican presidents. But he feared what the incoming administration might do.

In the past weeks, as the Trump administration has signaled radical changes at the agency and attempted to entice workers into leaving, he feels he made the right choice. “I didn’t know it was going to be this bad,” said Jonesi, who worked on litigation related to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico as well as cases that involved both water and air pollution. “I feel for my old colleagues. And I feel for the American public, who are being put in danger.”

Other career employees expressed a mixture of fear, resignation and quiet defiance as they faced a painful decision: quit or work for an administration that has openly proclaimed its intention to radically transform the agency in addition to rolling back environmental protections.

In his first weeks in office, President Donald Trump announced plans to reverse efforts to address climate change, abandon the EPA’s decadeslong focus on protecting the most vulnerable communities from pollution and step away from other key initiatives at the heart of the agency’s work.

At the same time, Trump has embarked on an unprecedented government-wide campaign to drive workers from their jobs. Employees throughout the federal government received offers to resign but get paid through September — a move experts say is legally questionable and unions have challenged in court. Some recently hired workers who are still on probation have been told their agencies have the right to immediately let them go.

EPA workers face additional threats. Trump’s team has discussed relocating the agency’s headquarters outside of Washington, D.C., a move that would likely force many of the roughly 7,000 employees who work there to quit. And he issued an executive order on “radical and wasteful government DEI programs,” which included a directive to terminate, “to the maximum extent allowed by law,” all environmental justice offices and positions. The order could result in the firing of hundreds of staff members who work on pollution in disproportionately burdened areas, which often have lower incomes, higher percentages of residents of color or both.

At a sometimes tearful meeting held at EPA headquarters and online on Wednesday, leaders of the agency’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights told staff members that the EPA was beginning to implement that directive. “We’re all preparing for the worst,” said one environmental protection specialist who attended the meeting, where workers were instructed to prepare for the possibility of being placed on administrative leave and download their human resources files. “We’re preparing to be laid off.”

Employees in other parts of the agency are similarly distraught.

“We feel terrorized,” said one of the more than 20 current EPA employees who communicated with ProPublica about their experience of working at the agency under the second Trump administration. None said they planned to take up the offer to resign, a proposal that the agency said in numerous emails is open to staff until Thursday.

While there is an obvious appeal of quitting a job when your employer is aggressively trying to oust you, the EPA staffer, whose work involves measuring pollution levels in air, water and soil at contaminated sites, said he felt a moral obligation to stay.

“If I leave, my experience would go with me and there would be no replacement,” he said. (Along with the other EPA employees quoted in this story, the scientist spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of retribution by the Trump administration.)

Others found the financial enticements to leave insulting. “I don’t work here for the fucking money,” said one longtime agency employee who works on air pollution. “I work here because I believe in it, and I want to serve the public.”

An emergency worker who responds to chemical fires, oil spills and national disasters echoed that sentiment, saying he has no intention of walking away from the work he’s done for more than 20 years, which he described as “the most challenging and amazing job there is.”

Other EPA employees are already bracing themselves for the possible end of their stints at the agency. One young scientist was winding down a day spent reviewing reports on drinking water last week when she received the email informing her that she had been identified as likely being on a probationary period and laying out the process for terminating her.

Until that point, she had been thinking of her first months in what she described as a “dream job” at the EPA as the beginning of a long career in civil service. “All that came crashing down when I got that email,” said the scientist, who recently finished graduate school and is now steeling herself for the likelihood that she will have to move back in with her parents.

If she goes, the scientist will join the more than 300 career staffers who have left since the election. That group is part of a brain drain of more than 500 EPA workers ProPublica identified as having departed since Nov. 22; the full group includes political appointees and short-term staff. Changes in administrations typically trigger turnovers at federal agencies, but ProPublica found the number leaving the EPA appears to have already eclipsed by more than 60 the number that left after President Joe Biden was elected in 2020. It is unclear exactly what motivated staffers to leave in recent weeks and how many more might be forced out or quit on their own terms in the coming days.

The shakeup is unprecedented, according to some veteran employees. “When you take a job at a federal agency, you know there are elections every four years. You know there are going to be changes in administration priorities,” said a scientist who has weathered many of these transitions during her more than 20 years working in the federal government. “This is something else.”

The EPA did not respond to questions for this story, including how many employees had taken the agency up on its offers to resign.

Taking the Side of Polluters

The EPA’s mission to protect human health and the environment requires it to do the often difficult work of regulating powerful companies. Under any administration, the agency faces intense lobbying from these entities as they seek to avoid expense and the burdens of compliance. Corporate pressure on the EPA was considerable under Biden as his administration attempted to tackle climate pollution.

But Trump appears eager to both scale back the agency, which has more than 15,000 employees, and align what remains of it with the companies it regulates. During the campaign, he asked oil executives for $1 billion while promising to cut environmental regulations, according to The Washington Post.

On Friday, two days after the Senate confirmed Lee Zeldin as EPA administrator, the agency put out a press release supporting Zeldin’s ability to “Unleash American Greatness.” Among those quoted were representatives of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the National Mining Association, the American Petroleum Institute and the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, all of which have recently challenged the agency in court.

In a brief welcome address, Zeldin discussed making the nation “energy dominant” and “turning the U.S. into the AI capital of the world.” (AI is widely recognized as a climate threat because it consumes vast amounts of energy.) Other Trump appointees have worked for fossil fuel and chemical companies and have previously opposed stricter environmental regulation. David Fotouhi, whom Trump nominated to be second-in-command of the agency, recently tried to overturn its ban on asbestos.

The administration is planning to remove civil service protections from certain federal workers, which would allow some positions now held by highly skilled personnel to be reclassified so they could be filled based on loyalty to the administration rather than expertise. The move could have tremendous implications for the EPA, whose workforce includes thousands of highly trained experts.

“If he replaces EPA scientists and lawyers with people who just want to say yes to him, it will be the death knell for the EPA,” said Kyla Bennett, director of science policy at Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

The Human Costs

The redirection of the agency and the loss of experienced professionals who respond to emergencies, monitor pollution, clean up highly contaminated areas and enforce environmental laws will have profound effects across the country.

“Nastier stuff than usual will come out of factories. More people will get cancer. More people will get heart disease. People will die sooner and they’ll be sicker,” said one Ph.D. scientist who works at the agency.

Because he spends part of his time focusing on health in particularly polluted areas, the scientist may find himself in the crosshairs of Trump’s order to eliminate all environmental justice work and positions. The order could directly affect as many as 250 EPA employees, according to Matthew Tejada, who served as the EPA deputy assistant administrator for environmental justice during the Biden administration.

The environmental justice office was established in 1992, after research donein the 1980s showed that communities with hazardous waste sites had higher percentages of Black and low-income residents. Two years later, President Bill Clinton signed an executive order requiring all federal agencies to make environmental justice part of their mission. As of publication, a page about the 1994 executive order had been removed from the EPA website. The agency also disabled EJScreen, an online mapping tool that was used to identify pollution levels in communities around the country, along with other information about environmental justice and climate change.

The Ph.D. scientist described the mood within his office as “a combination of exhaustion and exasperation with what’s very clearly a calculated campaign of harassment.” Still, he is hoping he will escape the apparently imminent purge of EPA staff working on environmental justice.

For some staff, the rapid changes are a bridge too far. One chemist who has worked at the agency for more than a decade described himself as seriously thinking about leaving — though on his terms, not in response to the administration’s resignation offer. “My motivation to work at EPA was because I want to protect human health and the environment and the lure of a stable job,” he told ProPublica. “But now all that’s gone.”

Others say the administration’s aggressive efforts to drive them out of the EPA have left them only more determined to stay. “Personally, it makes me want to hang on until I have the chance to do (or not do) something worth getting fired for,” one lawyer said.

Another scientist, who oversees the cleanup of highly contaminated sites, agreed. He saw the departures from EPA norms and repeated offers to resign as designed to scare him and others out of the agency — and vowed that the tactics would not work on him.

“It won’t make me quit,” the scientist said. “Nothing is going to make me quit.”

Instead, the scientist recently bought a new Black history month T-shirt that he plans to wear when he is required to return to the office full time in late February. “I’m going to dare somebody to say something to me,” he said. He acknowledged that the move, which would broadcast his derision for the Trump administration’s retreat from environmental justice, could get him fired. But he said he didn’t care.

“I’m going to stand up to them,” the scientist said. “I may lose the battle, but principally I will have won the war.”

Kirsten Berg, Mollie Simon and Mariam Elba contributed research. Agnel Philip contributed data analysis.