How the Trump Administration Ended Independent Science at the E.P.A.

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How the Trump Administration Ended Independent Science at the E.P.A.

The agency’s prestigious research office spent decades doing scientific work insulated from political pressure. Now it’s being dismantled.

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Bryan Hubbell, former head of the air, climate and energy program at the Environmental Protection Agency’s research office. “I knew I wasn’t going to be able to keep doing the work.”

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Cornell Watson for The New York Times

By

Lisa Friedman

Reporting from Washington

April 27, 2026,

12:07 p.m. ET

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For more than a half-century, a prestigious scientific arm of the federal government did groundbreaking research aimed at saving American lives. It studied fertility, asthma, wildfires, drinking water, climate change and myriad other health threats.

In just one year, it has been almost completely dismantled.

One scientist, a doctor and expert in lung health, has recently been reassigned to a finance office. Another, an epidemiologist, has been told she has a new job issuing permits to handle hazardous waste permits. A toxicologist researching so-called forever chemicals on the East Coast has been asked to move to Dallas and hasn’t been told whether the research project will continue.

They are among more than 1,500 biologists, chemists and other experts at the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research and Development who have been laid off, reassigned or pressured to retire. Today, only 124 researchers remain, and this month they must decide whether to remain employed they will abandon their work and move to different parts of the agency, or the country.

Those who stay will no longer serve in an independent unit designed to be free from political interference. Instead, they will be overseen by Trump appointees or in a new unit directly under the administrator, Lee Zeldin. An internal memo in one office reviewed by The New York Times says its future research must “align with agency and administration priorities.”

Critics said the moves are part of the administration’s deregulatory fervor: Without independent science, they said, there can be few new limits on pollution or toxic chemicals.

The E.P.A. “just blew up a very well-performing organization that was making a difference, not only in the country but in the world,” said Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta, who led the research office under the first Trump administration.

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