Story highlights Trump and his aides announced a budget blueprint Monday that boosted defense spending

The cuts resemble the adversarial stance Scott Pruitt took while he was Oklahoma's attorney general

Washington (CNN) President Donald Trump may propose slashing as much as a quarter of the Environmental Protection Agency's budget, two sources tell CNN, a cut that one former EPA official said would be "devastating."

Trump and his aides announced a budget blueprint Monday that boosted defense spending by $54 billion while slashing non-defense programs by the same amount. While details on how the cuts would be made were scarce, sources inside the administration made clear that the EPA's budget would be a prime target.

The White House sent the budget proposal to the various government agencies on Monday with suggested cuts. Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, told reporters that the White House would work with agencies to work through how they plan to make the cuts.

While White House aides cast the cuts as "belt tightening" when they were announced, there is widespread concern within the EPA that the changes will dramatically alter the function of an agency that was created under Republican President Richard Nixon in 1970.

A current EPA employee, who requested anonymity in order to speak freely, said the cuts will weaken the agency to the point where it can only do its most basic functions.

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