800 Ex-EPA Experts Are Building a Record Congress Can Use to Rebuild the Agency

Eight hundred former EPA experts and 30 paid staff now make up the Environmental Protection Network, a volunteer corps assembled largely from employees who left the agency during the Trump administration's second-term dismantling of its regulatory apparatus. Their message to Congress, regardless of which party controls either chamber after the election: start asking hard questions and build the record now.

Marc Boom, a former senior advisor in the EPA Office of Policy and now senior director for public affairs at EPN, laid out the stakes in an interview with Between The Lines' Melinda Tuhus. Under EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, the agency's staff has been slashed, programs cut, and already-announced grants rescinded — an ironic arc for an agency Republican President Richard Nixon created in response to public outrage over environmental conditions in the 1960s and early '70s.

The takeaway is plain: the agency's capacity to regulate has been physically reduced, and rebuilding it starts with documenting what was lost.

What has Congress actually done?

Boom drew a sharp line between the administration's actions and the current congressional majority's support for them.

"The current majority has actually helped advance the deregulatory agenda of the Trump administration," Boom said. He pointed to three concrete moves:

• Congress overturned existing pollution protections.
• It passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which stripped funding for pollution monitoring and enforcement technology.
• It postponed the methane pollution charge.

"The administration has certainly gone farther than what Congress has done," Boom added, faulting lawmakers for failing to provide "sustained scrutiny" of the health impacts of these changes.

Committee ranking members have already sent oversight requests for information, he noted, but EPA has not responded in a way that gives the public what it needs. Democrats, on the voting record, have opposed the deregulatory agenda.

Can oversight work without new laws?

Boom is blunt: a change in congressional control won't change the administration's approach. What it can do is create a documented record.

Whoever holds the gavels, he argues, should be demanding answers on process: who decided the rollbacks, whether they were based on science, and whether anyone assessed the health impacts. "The Democrats are already lining up to ask those harder questions," Boom said.

He flagged two cases where that scrutiny is overdue. A New York Times investigation traced how EPA granted pollution waivers for ethylene oxide — a cancer-causing air pollutant. Industry only had to send an email to obtain a waiver, Boom said, and then "had a seat at the table for the actual rollback," while career staff were pushed aside and scientific findings ignored.

The second case involves PFAS. A Sinclair Network national desk story reported EPA has been sitting on scientific studies and surveys that would let the agency go after PFAS contamination at the source and keep it out of waterways — material it has simply not moved forward.

"The loss of science at the agency and the sidelining of science is really an undercurrent for all of these actions," Boom said. The traditional scientific review process for assessing chemical risk, he added, has been completely sidelined.

Where does the next fight land?

Boom named one near-term target for congressional attention: data centers. Nearly every community is dealing with some form of data center development, and while political leaders focus on electricity bills, EPN wants the health costs on the table too.

EPN's own report, "The Hidden Health Costs of AI Data Centers," found the pollution costs are substantial — and that current federal actions will make that pollution worse, not better.

The report is available through the Environmental Protection Network at environmentalprotectionnetwork.org.

What happens next: the post-election balance in Congress determines whether the oversight requests already sitting unanswered at EPA get subpoena power behind them — the first measurable test of whether this record-building strategy can move.