US environmental agency halts funding for its main science division

E-mails reveal the stoppage at the US Environmental Protection Agency, which is encouraging workers to resign ahead of a reorganization

Lee Zeldin, director of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), announced on 2 May that the EPA would be undergoing a reorganization.Credit: Kayla Bartkowski/Getty

The administration of US President Donald Trump has blocked funding for research across the Environmental Protection Agency’s main science division, which employs nearly 1,500 people, according to sources inside the agency and internal e-mails seen by Nature. The messages detail a decision to halt funding for the Office of Research and Development (ORD) and wind down its laboratories, despite a spending agreement enacted by the US Congress in March that funded the EPA at 2024 levels through to September. Democrats on the US House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology (CSST) say that the e-mails also contradict statements that EPA representatives provided to them this week.

Sent on 7 May, one of the e-mails, which was first reported by E&E News, says that funding for research laboratories has been cut off except for requests related to health and safety. “ORD is shutting down their laboratory activities,” wrote Wayne Cascio, head of the Center for Public Health and Environmental Assessment, an ORD lab in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. “We are unsure if these laboratory activities will continue post-reorganization”, he told his staff members in the e-mail, which he co-signed with the centre’s deputy director Kay Holt.

This e-mail follows an announcement by Trump-appointed EPA director Lee Zeldin on 2 May that he plans to reorganize the agency and integrate “scientific staff directly into our program offices” instead of them being siloed in the ORD, “which will better ensure that research directly advances statutory obligations and mission-essential functions”. The ORD carries out research in support of environmental laws and regulations, such as assessing the safety of chemicals in drinking water. The division has long been a target of Trump and his Republican allies who question its science and say it oversteps its authority.

EPA representatives met with CSST staff members to discuss the ORD’s reorganization on the same day that Cascio’s e-mail was sent. “EPA explicitly told Science Committee staff … that there wouldn’t be any ‘monumental changes’ to ORD labs,” Zoe Lofgren, a member of the House of Representatives from California and the ranking Democrat on the committee, said in a statement to Nature. “Shutting down ORD laboratories, which are required by law, is as wrongheaded, unlawful, and stupid as it gets,” Lofgren added.

In a statement to Nature, EPA spokespeople said that the leaked e-mail is “factually inaccurate” and that the ORD is not part of the reorganization announced on 2 May. “At ORD and throughout the agency, EPA is continuing research to advance the mission of protecting human health and the environment,” they said.

Multiple sources across the ORD, however, told Nature that forward-looking research has already been shut down. A second e-mail seen by Nature, dated 8 May and sent by Timothy Watkins, the ORD’s deputy assistant administrator for management, confirms as much. In the e-mail, which went out to all ORD staff members, Watkins says that all funding requests “should have short time horizons (two to three months) and/or should focus [sic] safety/health and facilities.”

“They have basically shut ORD down by cutting off the money,” says Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta, who served as principal deputy assistant administrator at the ORD during Trump’s first presidency, and who is familiar with the situation inside the agency. The internal EPA e-mails come less than a week after the Trump administration released its budget proposal for the fiscal year 2026, which called for a 55% reduction in funding for the EPA and a 46% cut to the ORD.

These figures are not final — the US Congress decides how much money to ultimately appropriate. But the news of halted funding at ORD labs plays into fears among some government scientists and science-policy specialists that the Trump team is planning to make big cuts to science spending yet this year rather than wait for Congress to debate the 2026 request.

Reapply or resign

As part of the 2 May reorganization announcement, the nearly 1,500 people in the ORD — mostly scientists and engineers — have been given until midnight tonight to either apply for a new job within the EPA or take one of two deals that incentivize resignation: an early retirement for those eligible, or a package that provides months of free salary and benefits before termination. Thus far, fewer than 500 new jobs have been posted at the agency, with little to no detail about what the new positions entail.