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The Way We Work Now
I’m a Federal Employee Who Saw Trump Slash Environmental Protections
The Way We Work Now is a series chronicling how people’s lives and careers have fundamentally changed because of the pandemic.
Brian Kelly, 47, is an emergency responder for the Environmental Protection Agency and member of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 704 based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He spoke with Mai Tran about the shifting dynamic of working on environmental protections under the Trump administration compared to what Joe Biden proposes for his presidency.
I have been doing environmental work for 24 years, more than half my life; 18 of those years I have been working for the EPA. My title is on-scene coordinator. We go out to industrial accidents, train derailments, and abandoned facilities that have heavy contamination that needs to be removed right away. We also deploy nationally. I worked on the anthrax cleanup in Washington, D.C., the recovery of Space Shuttle Columbia in Texas, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Superstorm Sandy in New York, and the BP oil spill in Biloxi, Mississippi.
The last couple of years have seen an unprecedented attack on the federal workforce and the environment, all coming from the Trump administration. Here in region five, which covers Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, the EPA’s staffing level has fallen by 20%. Those staffing cuts changed how the EPA operated. While we were out in the field doing environmental cleanup work, a lot of our support staff was missing. We need support people to go to libraries and do record searches to find out who is responsible for contamination. I’m spending federal funds to do emergency cleanups, but we also need to be able to conserve those resources and make sure that the polluter is held accountable. EPA’s policy is supposed to be that the polluter pays, but if you don’t have support staff to find the polluter, that…
