Why did the EPA suspend nearly 140 employees last week?
Last week, nearly 140 federal Environmental Protection Agency employees were put on administrative leave after signing their names on a letter listing concerns about the direction of the agency addressed to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin.
The letter, titled Declaration of Dissent, outlined five primary concerns and included signatures from employees at all EPA offices, including the Region 4 office in Atlanta, according to Colette Delawalla, founder and executive director of Stand Up For Science, the non-profit that partnered with the EPA employees to make the letter public.
The five concerns listed in the letter were: undermining public trust, ignoring scientific consensus to benefit polluters, reversing the EPA’s progress in America’s most vulnerable communities, dismantling the Office of Research and Development and promoting a culture of fear, forcing staff to choose between their livelihood and well-being.
Stand Up for Science got involved after some of the EPA employees approached Delawalla.
“The EPA folks wrote the letter and approached us and let us know that they were planning to send something like this to Administrator Zeldin,” Delawalla said. “We’ve posted the letter, we’ve allowed the public to add their name in support of the EPA folks, we’ve helped to manage and coordinate press, and ... we’ve tried to give these brave and very dedicated public servants a platform and access to our network for them to really raise the alarm to the American public.”
Delawalla, a psychology PhD candidate at Emory University, started Stand Up for Science in February after posting on Blue Sky, a new social media platform, about organizing a protest in Washington on March 7 to defend science in the wake of “devastating cuts to federal research funding and infrastructure, unprecedented government censorship of scientific work and targeted attacks on diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility,” their website reads.
The non-profit mobilizes and supports science activists to engage in real action items, like promoting the Declaration of Dissent, and now, supporting the suspended employees however possible, for example.
Zeldin did not respond to the concerns outlined in the letter, according to Delawalla. The employees placed on leave received emails informing them of gthe action last Thursday. Many, including Delawalla and a respresentative from a union representing many of these employees, contend the suspensions are unconstitutional, violating the employees’ first amendment rights
“Each employee should be able to voice their concerns about the direction that the agency may be heading,” said Dianna Myers, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Council 238, Local 534. “They have a right to freedom of speech.”
“I find this to be an astounding breach of First Amendment rights,” Delawalla said. “These are federal employees who cannot send concerns to their boss. They can’t send a letter of concerns to Congress -- that’s what this is saying. We should all be very appalled by this. This should be startling.”
However, the EPA defended this move. “The Environmental Protection Agency has a zero-tolerance policy for career bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging and undercutting the administration’s agenda as voted for by the great people of this country last November,” an EPA spokesperson said to The Telegraph in an email.
The suspended employees are still being paid and await formal interviews. But their absence has raised concerns about disruptions to their critical work.
Some of the jobs affected included water testing specialists, environmental cleanup responders, mitigation teams and environmental justice researchers.
“This group that was placed on the administrative leave is definitely going to have an impact to the agency, because the agency is already very short staffed, so when you take employees away from their jobs, then that just further makes the staffing shortage scenario even worse,” Myers said
Stand Up for Science posted a similar-style letter written by National Institutes of Health employees called the Bethesda Declaration about a month ago. IT drew more than 30,000 signatures of support, with approximately 450 being NIH employee signatures, once posted to their website.
That letter drew a much different reaction. The director of the National Institutes, Jay Bhattacharya, invited some of the signers of the Bethesda Declaration to a closed meeting rather than placing them all on administrative leave.
“When we did the Bethesda Declaration, people were very, very nervous,” Delawalla said. “At this point, there hasn’t been any retaliation against those folks who signed. (Bhattacharya) hasn’t responded by trying to fire all the people that spoke out ... (he) did the decent thing, and you didn’t violate their First Amendment right.”
At the time the letter was sent to Zeldin, it had about 280 signatures. Now it has 6,264.
