On Earth Day, EPA union workers decry cuts to clean air and water regulations

Earth Day was marked not with celebration but with a sense of urgency and despair for Environmental Protection Agency union members in Chicago as the Trump administration continues to roll back environmental regulations and lay off hundreds of employees.

On Tuesday, more than 50 Midwest EPA union members and environmental advocates, many dressed in black, held tombstone-shaped signs as they chanted, “We want clean air, we want clean water," in downtown Chicago.

Jennifer Walling, executive director for the Illinois Environmental Council, stood in front of the crowd and accused the White House of choosing to put cost cutting over the health and well-being of Americans.

“If we're not paying these workers and we're not paying in dollars, we're paying with people's organs, we're paying with children's health,” Walling said. “We're paying with lives.”

Trump's appointed EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, announced a massive rollback of environmental regulations in March and hundreds of layoffs Tuesday to drive "a dagger through the heart of climate change religion.”

Ellie Hagen, who works in the EPA's Environmental Justice Community Health and Environmental Review Division, said she received a layoff notice Monday at 5 p.m.

Zeldin sent out termination notices primarily to staff working on environmental justice programs like Hagen’s. Her entire division, now terminated, was deemed “wasteful.”

She had been working on childhood lead poisoning prevention and emergency preparedness for communities at risk of climate change across the Midwest. Hagen screened soil for lead levels in Ohio homes and helped communities combat lead exposure.

“There's nothing divisive or partisan about the work we do. We simply target communities that have the highest levels of pollution burden and the worst health outcomes and figure out ways to reduce their pollution burden,” Hagen said.

Many people will be affected by the job cuts, she said.

Brian Urbaszewski, director of environmental health programs at the Respiratory Health Association of Metropolitan Chicago, took a moment to celebrate the progress made in reducing air pollution since the first Earth Day in 1970.

According to his organization's research, EPA regulations have prevented more than 2.3 million premature deaths and 200,000 heart attacks.

But, Urbaszewski said, the administration is dismantling the framework that made that progress possible.

As part of the rollbacks, Zeldin will reevaluate more than 30 EPA regulations, including emissions standards for vehicles and standards for hazardous air pollutants in the energy and manufacturing sectors.

“When you gut the scientists and the people who know how that process runs, you have to rebuild that infrastructure, and that could take years before you start the process of trying to restore what was lost," Urbaszewski said.

He and several others at the protest said they hope Congress will step in to pass legislation fully funding the EPA.