Swati Rayasam knew her job at EPA would be upended. She just didn’t expect it to happen so soon.
“You are receiving this email because you have been identified as an EPA employee working in ‘environmental justice’ or a diversity, equity, and inclusion position and/or office,” the Feb. 6 message read.
Rayasam, an environmental protection specialist based in the San Francisco Bay Area, was immediately placed on paid administrative leave. Now threatened with a potentially permanent layoff, she’s one of hundreds of EPA employees facing dismissal or reassignment in a purge without precedent.
For Rayasam, it likely spells the end of a career begun only a year and a half ago. But the episode also highlights a seeming paradox at the heart of the Trump administration’s agenda as EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin highlights the importance of clean air, land and water for “every American.”
That, says Rayasam, is exactly what her job entailed.
With a background in ensuring that the laws apply “to all the people that live in this country,” she said in one of several video interviews with POLITICO’s E&E News, “I really saw the opportunity at the Office of Environmental Justice to make that a reality.”
Zeldin has axed Raysam’s job, as part of a drive to abolish EPA’s entire Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights.
That’s in line with President Donald Trump’s day one executive order to end initiatives related to diversity, equity and inclusion, which Trump has characterized as a form of reverse discrimination. Zeldin has described the move as “elimination of forced discrimination programs.” At EPA and other agencies, the administration has proceeded with implementation of the White House’s directive at striking speed.
Trump’s and Zeldin’s stances represent “the larger political discourse … and a fundamental misunderstanding of what environmental justice is,” Rayasam said.
Trump’s executive orders, for example, skate over the abundant studies showing that people of color and low-income communities are more likely to face exposure to dangerous pollution. By Rayasam’s description, environmental justice is woven by law into the work of EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, perennially swamped with reviews of new chemicals before they can go on the market.
That misunderstanding has left her, a public health scientist focused on chemicals policy, as “just a sitting duck,” she said.
Instead of doing a job where she mostly worked in tandem with the chemicals office, Rayasam now sits in limbo as her agency ID card gathers dust.
Her plight is emblematic of the whiplash accompanying the transition from President Joe Biden’s administration, which put an unparalleled emphasis on environmental justice, to Trump’s.
‘Too much work’
Her looming ouster results from Zeldin’s insistence that EPA circumscribe its activities only to those authorized by statute.
By his reading, that means EPA needs to reassign at least 100 staffers elsewhere within the agency to help clear the backlog of new chemicals awaiting review by the chemical safety office.
Major amendments passed to the Toxic Substances Control Act in 2016 created a new requirement for regulators to make a safety determination on each new chemical before it is allowed into the market, which industry trade groups complain has created significant wait times impeding the nation’s innovation and manufacturing capabilities.
The new TSCA amendments also require the agency to rein in dangerous uses of some of the most notorious industrial mainstays, such as asbestos or formaldehyde. The statute spells out the factors EPA must consider when deciding which existing substances will be prioritized for review, including consideration of “potentially exposed or susceptible subpopulations.”
Rayasam said that’s a “pretty explicit” example of a statute mandating environmental justice practices, and factoring in population and exposure variability is a relatively new priority for EPA.
That’s where the environmental justice office staffers stepped in, she said.
“EPA has always had too much work,” Rayasam said. “So [the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights] provided a breath of fresh air, to be able to say … ‘You have all these people working to assist [the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention] on a specific thing that we’re trying to achieve. Not just because the administration thinks it’s important, but because the statute and statutory amendments actually call for it.'”
Take formaldehyde, for example.
It’s a compound fiercely defended by industry trade groups as critical for sterilizing medical devices and for the production of various building materials or consumer products.
But inhalation of its fumes can lead to cancer, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer, and other serious long-term illnesses. Communities surrounding formaldehyde manufacturing plants are among the populations at risk for associated chronic illnesses, according to EPA’s final risk evaluation for formaldehyde.
Part of Rayasam’s job was to make sure EPA’s scientific assessments considered the impacts on largely overlooked — and highly exposed — communities in chemical risk assessments, such as formaldehyde exposure for people living in mobile homes.
“All the work that I did was also in the interest of EPA using the best available, most robust science that considered all the communities that it was required to consider, including [potentially exposed or susceptible subpopulations],” she said.
‘An ounce of prevention’
Environmental justice, according to a 1998 EPA definition, “means that no group of people should bear a disproportionate burden of environmental harms and risks, including those resulting from the negative environmental consequences of industrial, governmental, and commercial operations or programs and policies.”
According to Zeldin, environmental justice is “the desire is that these people or communities that have been left behind deserve and need attention to be able to remediate and deal with an environmental issue.”
“I couldn’t possibly agree with that definition more,” he said at a conference in March.
But Zeldin works for a president who has methodically razed decades of work to weave environmental justice into the fabric of the federal government’s day-to-day business.
And during various media appearances, Zeldin has blamed the Biden administration for losing sight of that core bipartisan goal and has targeted environmental justice work “as an excuse to fund left-wing activists” who diagnose what the problem is instead of on direct remediation of the issue.
In response to questions, EPA press secretary Carolyn Holran reemphasized Zeldin’s past comments, adding, “the Trump EPA is focused on providing clean air, land, and water for every American regardless of race, gender, creed, and background. … And we’ll do it without wasting billions in taxpayer dollars on left-wing activist giveaways.”
But Rayasam said Zeldin’s assessment overlooks the importance of preventing exposures before they happen.
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” she said.
Raised in Durham, North Carolina, Rayasam grew up about an hour’s drive from Warren County, a primarily Black enclave where 1982 landfill protests are seen as a pivotal force in launching the environmental justice movement nationally.
She got degrees in biology and global health, then worked for almost five years in a program on reproductive health and the environment at the University of California, San Francisco. She started at EPA in November 2023.
“People thought I was going to come in like a hammer, basically, for EJ communities,” Rayasam said. “The first thing I would say to literally anybody is ‘You guys have a mountain of work, and I’m just here to try to figure out how to help you get it done. I’m here to pitch in, I would never ask people to modify anything that I was not willing to put my own skin in.'”
Joining Rayasam on the calls with E&E News were attorneys from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a worker advocacy group representing her and other idled environmental justice staffers in a complaint filed in April with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, an ostensibly independent agency charged with enforcing federal workforce safeguards.
The complaint seeks to force EPA to put them all back to work partly on the grounds that federal law limits administrative leave to no more than 10 days per year. The special counsel’s office is now investigating, according to Laura Dumais, staff counsel for PEER.
A spokesperson for the special counsel’s office declined to comment.
In February, Trump fired the office’s chief, Hampton Dellinger, a Biden administration appointee who had been contesting the push to cashier thousands of probationary workers throughout the government. In Dellinger’s place, Trump named Jamieson Greer as acting head. Greer, who is also serving as U.S. trade representative, quickly dropped the inquiry into the firings. Trump last week said he was tapping Paul Ingrassia, a former right-wing podcast host, to lead the office.
“It really looks like the OSC is now under new management,” Dumais said. “It just really highlights the importance of an OSC that’s not controlled directly by the executive branch.”
Sean Reilly and Ellie Borst can be reached on Signal at SeanReilly.70 and eborst.64.
