The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track planetary extreme, or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😉
Main Topic: ‘Sick’: Trump Marks Earth Day with Layoff Notice for Hundreds of EPA Staff
Dear Diary. As I wrote a couple of days ago, this Earth Day marks a new era in which environmental progress gets stymied by Trump. Bringing that point home, we now learn that Trump fired hundreds of Environmental Protection Agency workers on April 22nd. Back when Earth Day began to be celebrated in the 1970s, I remember that there were advertisements featuring an Indian mounted on a horse who upon seeing trash next to a roadway was moved to cry tears.
That Indian would really be crying and upset with what Trump is doing to rollback progress made by the EPA fifty years after his commercials were made. After the early 1970s the U.S. cleaned up a lot of trash from coast to coast, cleaned up rivers and lakes, and eliminated polluting smokestacks.
Here is how the EPA started from the EPA website:
https://www.epa.gov/history/origins-epa
The American conversation about protecting the environment began in the 1960s. Rachel Carson had published her attack on the indiscriminate use of pesticides, Silent Spring, in 1962. Concern about air and water pollution had spread in the wake of disasters. An offshore oil rig in California fouled beaches with millions of gallons of spilled oil. Near Cleveland, Ohio, the Cuyahoga River, choking with chemical contaminants, had spontaneously burst into flames. Astronauts had begun photographing the Earth from space, heightening awareness that the Earth’s resources are finite.
In early 1970, as a result of heightened public concerns about deteriorating city air, natural areas littered with debris, and urban water supplies contaminated with dangerous impurities, President Richard Nixon presented the House and Senate a groundbreaking 37-point message on the environment. These points included:
- requesting four billion dollars for the improvement of water treatment facilities;
- asking for national air quality standards and stringent guidelines to lower motor vehicle emissions;
- launching federally-funded research to reduce automobile pollution;
- ordering a clean-up of federal facilities that had fouled air and water;
- seeking legislation to end the dumping of wastes into the Great Lakes;
- proposing a tax on lead additives in gasoline;
- forwarding to Congress a plan to tighten safeguards on the seaborne transportation of oil; and
- approving a National Contingency Plan for the treatment of oil spills.
Around the same time, President Nixon also created a council in part to consider how to organize federal government programs designed to reduce pollution, so that those programs could efficiently address the goals laid out in his message on the environment.
Following the council’s recommendations, the president sent to Congress a plan to consolidate many environmental responsibilities of the federal government under one agency, a new Environmental Protection Agency. This reorganization would permit response to environmental problems in a manner beyond the previous capability of government pollution control programs:
- The EPA would have the capacity to do research on important pollutants irrespective of the media in which they appear, and on the impact of these pollutants on the total environment.
- Both by itself and together with other agencies, the EPA would monitor the condition of the environment–biological as well as physical.
- With these data, the EPA would be able to establish quantitative “environmental baselines”–critical for efforts to measure adequately the success or failure of pollution abatement efforts.
- The EPA would be able–in concert with the states–to set and enforce standards for air and water quality and for individual pollutants.
- Industries seeking to minimize the adverse impact of their activities on the environment would be assured of consistent standards covering the full range of their waste disposal problems.
- As states developed and expanded their own pollution control programs, they would be able to look to one agency to support their efforts with financial and technical assistance and training.
After conducting hearings during that summer, the House and Senate approved the proposal. The agency’s first Administrator, William Ruckelshaus, took the oath of office on December 4, 1970.
Here are more details from the Conversation:
https://www.commondreams.org/news/epa-staff
Demonstrators march during a “Hands off the EPA” rally outside the Environmental Protection Agency office in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on Earth Day, April 22, 2025. (Photo: Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty Images)
‘Sick’: Trump Marks Earth Day With Layoff Notice for Hundreds of EPA Staff
“The only people who will benefit from their firings are corporate polluters.”
Apr 22, 2025
As defenders of the planet marked Earth Day with pledges to fight the destructive agenda of U.S. President Donald Trump, some green groups on Tuesday responded with alarm to the administration’s plans for layoffs at the Environmental Protection Agency.
Several news outlets obtained the notice that EPA Assistant Deputy Administrator Travis Voyles sent on Monday evening to staffers with the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights as well as regional EJ divisions, warning of a reduction in force (RIF) that will cut 280 employees and reassign about 175 others this summer.
“This action is necessary to align our workforce with the agency’s current and future needs and to ensure the efficient and effective operation of our programs,” Voyles said. “With this action, EPA is delivering organizational improvements to the personnel structure that will directly benefit the American people and better advance the agency’s core mission of protecting human health and the environment.”
The Washington Postnoted that “the news comes months after the agency placed 171 of the office’s employees on administrative leave and then reversed course, reinstating dozens of regional employees in offices across the country,” and as decision-makers at the EPA have been weighing how to implement Trump’s executive order targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
“It’s a gut punch but long expected,” said an employee who was put on leave in February and spoke with the Post on the condition of anonymity. “Announcing a RIF of the EJ program on the eve of Earth Day is sick and shows exactly who they are.”
Joyce Howell, executive vice president of the American Federation of Government Employees Council 238 that represents over 8,400 EPA workers nationwide, toldReuters that “decimating our agency and environmental justice workforce goes against our oath to protect human health and to keep our planet healthy and habitable for future generations.”
In a Tuesday statement, Sierra Club executive director Ben Jealous similarly said that “the Trump administration is determined to destroy the stated mission of the Environmental Protection Agency to protect human health and the environment. All of us deserve to have clean air to breathe, safe water to drink, and be protected from toxic pollution.”
“Instead, the Trump administration is selling us out to corporate polluters by actively working to slash clean air and water protections and laying off critical environmental justice staff,” he continued. “The people that Donald Trump is putting out of work are hardworking, dedicated civil servants who have devoted their careers to protecting our clean air and water and securing a livable future for us all. The only people who will benefit from their firings are corporate polluters.”
Chitra Kumar, a former official with the impacted EPA office who’s now managing director at the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Climate and Energy Program, said in a statement that “the layoff notice sent to employees claimed their dismissal would ‘better advance the agency’s core mission of protecting human health and the environment,’ which is the height of hypocrisy given that these staffers are working to reduce pollution and toxins in the communities suffering the most harm.”
“Scientific data shows that, due to historic and ongoing injustices, communities overburdened by polluting industries, smog-forming traffic, and contaminated waterways and soil are predominantly low-income, Black, Brown, and Indigenous. Exposure to consistently higher levels of pollution increases the risk of asthma, heart and lung ailments, cancer, and even death,” said Kumar, who took aim at EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin.
“Zeldin and the Trump administration continue to focus on propping up the profits of coal, oil, and gas companies and other big polluters who take advantage of every loophole available at the expense of public health. This is about all of us, our children, and grandchildren,” she stressed. “If Administrator Zeldin goes forward with this destructive move, he will be responsible for ending decades of work intended to help set right the harmful legacy of pollution in overburdened communities in a handout to big polluters.”
Kumar pointed out that “this is also part of the Trump administration’s larger ongoing strategy to dismantle EPA and its core functions and undermine its very mission, which is to help keep all people in America safe. In the time ahead, Zeldin is expected to launch a repeal, or ‘no enforce’ order, for a host of science-backed environmental regulations and engage in a wholesale ‘reorganization’ of the agency, including gutting the Research and Development Office that produces science undergirding EPA decisions.”
As criticism of Zeldin and Trump’s plans for the EPA mounted, people protested against the administration in communities across the country. Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of the youth-led Sunrise Movement, said in a statement that “Donald Trump, backed by fossil fuel billionaires, is waging a full-scale assault on the very lifesaving protections that Earth Day was created to demand.”
While Republicans currently control the White House and both chambers of Congress, some elected Democrats used Earth Day to advocate for policies that would protect the planet. Multiple senators used the day to promote bills that would protect the Pacific and Atlantic oceans from offshore oil and gas drilling.
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Jessica Corbett is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.
Related:
Here are more “ET’s” recorded from around the planet the last couple of days, their consequences, and some extreme temperature outlooks, as well as any extreme precipitation reports:
Here is More Climate News from Wednesday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)