The 1,500 or so employees at ORD, though, are still waiting for the axe to fall. They have been encouraged to apply for other positions at other parts of the agency, though per reporting from Chemical & Engineering News and others there will likely only be 500 or so of those available — leaving a solid thousand people out of a job, and the EPA out of an enormous chunk of the scientific expertise and research that underpins the regulations it is supposedly tasked with creating and enforcing.
At another ORD town hall on Wednesday, according to a source who attended, details of the coming dissolution remained scarce. What’s more, the actual logistics of the reorganization are likely a bit more complicated than the bones of an agency are prepared to handle — one person at the town hall asked directly if enough HR staff remained to handle a theoretical transfer of 500 people from one job to another, along with the hundreds or thousands more who have accepted the early retirement or other “please leave voluntarily so we don’t have to fire you” options EPA and other agencies have put on the board. The answer: “I don’t know.”
Though again the details are not yet clear, there is also a rumor inside ORD that all senior level positions have been approved from on high to be included in a reduction in force — no ORD leadership, no ORD. The end result here is most likely exactly what Zeldin and the Trump administration want: a science-challenged, bureaucratically hamstrung EPA, largely incapable of developing regulations but more than ready to attempt to roll existing regs back, “unleashing” corporate America back to its glory days of smog, soot, and ruin.
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