The EPA Is Trying to Terrify Employees Into Quitting

More than 1,100 Environmental Protection Agency employees could be at risk of spontaneously losing their jobs, according to a Trump administration memo.

Employees at risk include individuals who have spent less than a year in their current role, even if they were longtime employees of other divisions or departments.

“As a probationary/trial period employee, the agency has the right to immediately terminate you,” the email, obtained Monday by The New York Times, states.

A spokeswoman for Lee Zeldin, the newly minted administrator of the environmental agency and a longtime Trump ally, told the Times that “our goal is to be transparent.” She did not elaborate on when or why the mass layoff would begin.

“On his first day in office, [Zeldin] engaged directly with career staff across E.P.A.’s headquarters—spanning two city blocks in downtown D.C.—listening to their insights and perspectives,” the spokeswoman, Molly Vaseliou, told the publication in a statement. “Ultimately, the goal is to create a more effective and efficient federal government that serves all Americans.”

On Monday morning, agency employees were notified that their intranet was out of service, leaving them unable to do their jobs as they could not access internal documents or data, reported the Times. It is not clear if the intranet outage was directly related to efforts to cut the EPA staff.

The result: Morale at the agency is in freefall, with some employees feeling the pressure to finally consider Trump’s controversial “buyout” offer, which would pay them through September on the condition of their resignations.

“It’s bad,” Marie Owens-Powell, president of the EPA union, told CBS News on Friday. “I’ve been with the agency for over 33 years and I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“As far as we can tell, EPA workers were the only ones to receive a notice from their agency, intended to go to probationary employees to terrorize and scare them into thinking they were on their way out,” she said.

Hundreds of EPA grantees have also been locked out of their funds, according to Michelle Roos, president of the Environmental Protection Network. She told CBS that it has left organizations across the country unable to do the work for which the federal government has already approved funding.

Roos also told the Times that the EPA had long been at the center of the “bullseye” in the forty-seventh president’s mission to nix large swaths of civil servants, and that the drastic move to downsize EPA staff would be the “most chaotic and vindictive transition in the history of the Environmental Protection Agency.”

Legal experts claim that the Trump administration’s move to choke congressionally appropriated funding from federal agencies is “unconstitutional” and “unauthorized by law.”

“Ninety-five percent of the funding going to EPA has not only been appropriated but is locked in, legally obligated grant funding,” Jillian Blanchard, vice president of climate change and environmental justice for Lawyers for Good Government, told CBS. “The Constitution does not give the president a line item veto over Congress’s spending decision.”

Elon Musk has taken control of government employees’ private data by having his cronies illegally install a commercial server at the Office of Personnel Management.

Musk and his handpicked associates at the fake “Department of Government Efficiency” are using their ill-gotten access to control federal databases containing Social Security numbers, home addresses, medical histories, and other sensitive personal information, according to journalists Caleb Ecarma and Judd Legum at Musk Watch.

Many of these Musk staffers are young people between 19 and 24, such as software engineer Akash Bobba, an undergraduate student at University of California, Berkeley, and 2022 high school graduate Edward Coristine. At Musk’s direction, these inexperienced underlings now have access to the private information of every federal employee, and even people who have merely applied to federal jobs.

Musk’s people were given access to the federal government’s official hiring site USAJOBS, where people hoping to secure a federal job often enter their personal information including Social Security numbers, home addresses, and employment records, in their applications. They also gained access to the Enterprise Human Resources Integration, or EHRI, system, which contains Social Security numbers, dates of birth, salaries, home addresses, job descriptions, and disciplinary records of every single federal employee.

“They’re looking through all the position descriptions … to remove folks,” said one OPM employee about Musk’s team. “This is how they found all these DEI offices and had them removed—[by] reviewing position description level data.”

In addition, the DOGE staffers also have access to systems relating to onboarding, job performance reviews, and even the system the government uses to manage employee health care, which could violate laws on protected health information, such as HIPAA.

“What [Musk is] doing will put so many government employees at risk. It’s not at all what the office is intended for,” a former OPM director told Musk Watch. “I just can’t believe what I’m seeing.”

The unprecedented access also leaves federal employee data unsecured and vulnerable to hackers, said one OPM employee. One of the new email lists created by Musk’s people was already hit by a flood of spam emails last week.

“China and Russia are literally trying to hack us every day, and we just gave all this data over to somebody that’s not been properly vetted,” one of the OPM staffers said. “It’s not just Amanda Scales, it’s all the [political appointees] in that office right now. So it’s multiple vulnerability points.”

Many senior government officials have been locked out of EHRI and OPM, and thus can’t track what changes have been made by DOGE cronies. They could be doing irreparable damage to the federal civil service in their attempts to thin it out, with few, if any, ways of finding out what they’re doing. It kind of makes Hillary Clinton’s storing of government data on a private email server look rather quaint, doesn’t it?

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday he’s now in charge of the U.S. Agency for International Development, just hours after billionaire Elon Musk announced Donald Trump had signed off on shutting the agency down.

“I’m the acting director of USAID,” Rubio told reporters on a visit to El Salvador, criticizing the agency’s “insubordination” in complying with national interests.

“It’s a completely unresponsive agency. It’s supposed to respond to policy directives with the State Department, and it refuses to do so,” Rubio said. “Every dollar we spend and every program we fund, that program will be aligned with the national interest of the United States. USAID has a history of sort of ignoring that.”

The decades-old independent agency employs more than 10,000 people and works on the ground in more than 60 countries. It has been a target for both Musk and Trump in recent days, both of whom claim that its work is a waste of government funding.

The USAID overhaul is part of a larger assault on foreign aid funding, which Trump halted for 90 days in an executive order he signed January 20. Rubio later froze all funding, projects, and contracts at USAID, and at least 56 officials were placed on leave. On Saturday, the USAID website went offline without explanation, and two days later, USAID employees were told to stay home.

“These are taxpayer dollars and we owe the American people the assurance that every dollar we are spending abroad is being spent on something that furthers our national interest,” Rubio said Monday.

Rubio told reporters that some USAID programs will continue but under the umbrella of the State Department, an alarming move Democrats warned could be detrimental to national security.

“Congress established the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) as an independent agency, separate from the Department of State, to ensure that we can deploy development expertise and U.S. foreign assistance quickly, particularly in times of crisis, to meet our national security goals,” Democrats on the Foreign Relations Committee wrote in a letter to Rubio on Monday.

“For this reason, any effort to merge or fold USAID into the Department of State should be, and by law must be, previewed, discussed, and approved by Congress.”

This story has been updated.

President Donald Trump and his fans are framing his agreement with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to back away from tariffs as some huge strongman victory. They are sorely mistaken. 

At midnight Monday, Trump placed 25 percent tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico over claims the countries aren’t doing enough to stop “drug smuggling” and undocumented immigrants from crossing the border. Canada and Mexico were prepared to retaliate with their own retaliatory tariffs, but before that could happen, Trump and Sheinbaum announced they had come to an agreement: His tariffs on Mexico are delayed for a month, and she sends 10,000 Mexican soldiers to the border.

“I just spoke with President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico. It was a very friendly conversation wherein she agreed to immediately supply 10,000 Mexican Soldiers on the Border separating Mexico and the United States,” Trump announced on Truth Social. “These soldiers will be specifically designated to stop the flow of fentanyl, and illegal migrants into our Country.”

“We further agreed to immediately pause the anticipated tariffs for a one month period during which we will have negotiations headed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent, and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, and high-level Representatives of Mexico. I look forward to participating in those negotiations, with President Sheinbaum, as we attempt to achieve a “deal” between our two Countries.” 

The MAGAsphere immediately rejoiced. “2 weeks in:Mexico caved, Panama caved, Colombia caved,Venezuela caved…” right-wing X account End Wokeness wrote.

“At this rate of achievement, not only should President Donald Trump be on Mount Rushmore, I want to personally work the chisel!” fawned Elon Musk, quoting the End Wokeness post. 

There are multiple issues with this facade that the Trump administration is putting on. 

Firstly, the number of Mexican soldiers Sheinbaum is sending to the border is routine. Mexico sent 15,000 troops to the border in 2019, and sent 10,000 again in 2021. 

“By the way, Mexico has sent its national guard to the border before, and it did jack shit to reduce fentanyl flows because the vast majority of fentanyl comes in via US CITIZENS GOING THROUGH LEGAL PORTS OF ENTRY,” wrote housing advocate Armand Domalewski.  

The economic timing of this “deal” also feels way too convenient. After Trump announced massive tariffs against some of our biggest trading partners, the U.S. stock market plummeted. Now Trump is walking back those tariffs while Mexico just sends their usual soldiers to the border. 

“The Dow opened almost 1000 points down and Trump already caved on Mexico tariffs,” one popular X user wrote.

“Ooof! Mexico, Canada and Wall Street call Trump’s Tariff bluff. NOW he wants to talk to Canada, delay tariffs on Mexico for a month and Wall Street is telling him real time his tariffs are ‘dumb,’” former RNC Chair Michael Steele wrote. “Ahh, the price of eggs, cars, avocados …”

The last part of the facade is the one Trump conveniently left out of his victory post: the guns. Sheinbaum wrote after speaking with Trump that “the United States is committed to working to prevent the trafficking of high-powered weapons to Mexico” as part of the tariff deal. It seems that Trump left this fairly important detail out of his own verbose post to keep up the strongman appearances. 

So Mexico is sending extra troops to the border, as it regularly has in the past, and Trump agreed to shoulder a heavier burden in stopping the flow of American semiautomatic weapons into Mexico. How exactly did Mexico fold to Trump here?

Donald Trump’s tariff war is too much for his otherwise steadfast ally Senator Ron Johnson, who compared the decision to impose 25 percent tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada to Great Depression–era trade policy and warned of the consequences.

“I don’t believe that is productive. It is going to hurt American companies, American exporters, it will hurt American consumers long term,” Johnson told the far-right news outlet NewsMax on Monday.

A hardcore fiscal conservative, Johnson blames government spending for pretty much everything. He’s lauded Trump’s massive federal budget cuts and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. But when it comes to limiting free trade, Johnson said he “can’t predict where this all goes.”

“I’m concerned,” the Wisconsin Republican told NewsMax.

On Saturday, Trump imposed 25 percent tariffs on America’s top trading partners, which will make everything from avocados to children’s toys more expensive. The decision naturally sparked outrage and disbelief from both countries, leading to an agreement with Mexico to delay the tariffs for at least a month. Canada, meanwhile, has already taken retaliatory measures.

“Tariffs are a tax. When you tax something, you get less of it, so we’ll probably get fewer imports, but then with retaliation, fewer exports,” Johnson warned.

Johnson compared the tariffs to the Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930, which raised import duties on imported goods to protect American farmers. The heavily protested policy wreaked havoc on global trade and worsened economic conditions for Americans in an already precarious time.

Several other Republicans, including Mitch McConnell, have also slammed Trump’s tariffs, but most remain determinedly loyal in light of a decision that will harm American consumers and likely unleash global economic chaos.