The Trump administration is again seeking to halve the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) annual budget with a proposed $4.2 billion fiscal year 2027 (FY27) spending plan that slashes $4.6 billion–or 52.4 percent–from this year’s $8.8 billion appropriation.
The request is the same $4.2 billion the administration proposed in its FY26 EPA budget that sought to gut $5.3 billion–55 percent–from the previous year’s $9.5 billion allocation and called for whittling the agency’s 15,000 employees to 10,000, rescinding billions in approved agency-administered grants. and rolling back a broad slate of environmental regulations.
Ultimately, less than 8 percent was pared in the $8.8 billion agency budget Congress approved and only half the requested 5,000 staffing cut was enacted, but as EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin told the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Environment Subcommittee during an April 28 hearing, the agency has successfully orchestrated the “single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history” by rescinding the 2009 greenhouse gas endangerment finding and in “urgently reversing” Biden-imposed air quality rules that “tried hard to strangulate coal out of existence.”…