According to multiple sources inside the Environmental Protection Agency, an “upset” Administrator Lee Zeldin has begun retaliating against agency staff who signed a Declaration of Dissent opposing his destructive tenure. This is pretty obviously illegal.
Some signers began receiving notices — sometimes to their personal email accounts — that they were being put on administrative leave, “pending an investigation” into their actions. By one account, the leave period is 10 days, at least for the moment. Regional directors and other administrative leaders were apparently called to a meeting on Thursday morning to discuss potential punishment for, again, signing a document more or less calling for the Environmental Protection Agency to get back to Protecting the Environment.
Per one source at EPA, and seconded by a ProPublica reporter on Bluesky, the union representing many EPA employees set the number of leave notices going out at 144, which would represent about one quarter of those who signed the document publicly. It is not clear what the “investigation” into these civil servants will entail; another EPA employee told Splinter that the non-profit that hosted the Declaration (and a similar one from National Institutes of Health Employees), Stand Up For Science, worked hard to ensure that anyone signing it would do so entirely off the clock. The Declaration itself notes that signers did so “in our personal capacity, on our own time, and without Agency resources.”
We will update this story if more information is made available.
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