Having just left the EPA after over three years as a Biden appointee, I have a message for everyone at the Environmental Protection Agency, and actually every federal employee here or anywhere: Please don’t quit. The world needs you.
Anyone who follows the news is seeing what President Donald Trump and Elon Musk are doing, but may be having a hard time keeping up with all the chaos, so here’s a little of what I’ve seen. In one of his early executive orders, Trump reclassified 50,000 federal employees, to cost them their employment and union protections. About 2 million federal employees recently got a buyout offer of questionable legality, and it looks like nearly all USAID workers are being fired. Here in Denver, 10 environmental justice workers at EPA were just put on administrative leave, with the strong implication that more firings are to come.
Trump also has made several recent unprecedented assaults on our federal workforce. He put a gag order on federal employees, including at EPA, telling them not to talk to people outside the federal government. That’s a chilling affront to transparency, denying you your right as a taxpayer to know what is really going on.
He has threatened to cut funding to programs that Congress has authorized and directed the federal workforce to implement.
The obvious thrust is to slash the size of the federal government by either directly firing them, encouraging them to leave, or undermining the programs they work on. But it’s a frighteningly shortsighted strategy because it treats talented Americans like they’re just numbers whose work has no value to society. Trump and Musk are wrong. I’ve seen the value up close and personal.
To all my former colleagues at the EPA, if you leave, who is going to keep kids safe the next time a teenager brings a jar of mercury he found in his basement to school and spreads it all over? Who’s going to respond to the next train derailment that spills asphalt and molten sulfur into a river? Who’s going to check water systems for safe drinking water, when a state can’t or won’t do it themselves? Who’s going to deal with that leaking underground storage tank releasing petroleum into the soil if the business owner can’t or won’t? Who’s going to clean up the Superfund sites in Clear Creek County, Silverton, Canon City, and Pueblo? Who’s going to fund Colorado’s air monitoring network? Who’s going to work with the agricultural community on the latest pesticide science?
Torching the federal workforce using Musk’s slash and burn also will harm local, regional, and personal economies. With nearly 40,000 federal civil servants, the Denver metro area is the biggest location for federal employees outside of Washington DC. These are real people who work on real issues, from clean water to public lands, from veterans’ health to housing programs, and from weather monitoring to managing Medicaid systems.
While reports change by the day, as of Feb. 6, about 30,000 to 40,000 federal employees had accepted the buyout offer. But who really believes that will be enough for Musk and Trump? Whether it’s a new buyout proposal or not, it would be foolhardy to believe they won’t keep trying. This all poses real-life threats to our health, environment, data security, public education, and so much more.
I’ll repeat my call to our top-notch federal employees: stand your ground and stay in your jobs. We, the people, need your expertise to help make sure our nation functions like the modern world leader that it has been for generations.
KC Becker was the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 8 administrator under President Joe Biden. Becker was a Colorado state representative from 2013 to 2021 and she served three years as speaker of the House.
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