The Environmental Protection Agency employs about 13,000 people to protect Americans from pollution. Last week, fewer than 900 were working, the rest having been furloughed due to the government shutdown. Among those who reported for duty was Andrew Wheeler, the agency’s acting administrator and President Trump’s nominee to succeed ousted chief Scott Pruitt. “We are still on the job,” he insisted during his Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday.

Wheeler said the EPA is still responding to environmental emergencies—like wildfires in California, which have become a year-round event—and still meeting court-ordered deadlines to make progress on regulations. But there’s so much more the EPA does on a daily basis that is no longer happening, said former EPA regional administrator Judith Enck, who led Region 2 through two shutdowns under President Barack Obama. “Scheduled [safety] inspections are not happening. Groundwater data is not being processed. Drinking water sampling is not happening,” she said. “This is going to be a problem if the shutdown keeps up.”



It’s already a problem. From the halt in monitoring of uranium on the Colorado River and toxic algae in Florida, to the trash overflows and vandalism at national parks across the country, the shutdown is already causing environmental damage. As the Democrats on the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee pointed out:

In Indiana, the #TrumpShutdown is forcing families to wait even longer for information from @EPA about a housing complex with dangerously high lead levels in the soil pic.twitter.com/S1JSbuewge — EPW Democrats (@EPWDems) January 14, 2019

Wheeler acknowledged on Wednesday that some of the EPA’s efforts to protect human health and the environment have been delayed, including a plan to address widespread water contamination by cancer-causing chemicals. But there is far more at stake than what Wheeler described.

“The consequences of the shutdown on public health and the environment include the slow-down or cessation of clean-up work at hundreds of toxic Superfund sites across the country, a halt in most EPA inspection and enforcement activities, and a stop to new chemical and pesticide safety evaluations and approvals,” a group of Senate Democrats wrote in a letter sent to Wheeler last week.