Current and former staff say projects that mention climate change have been ‘de-emphasized and halted’ as EPA tears up key planks of emissions-lowering agenda

Current and former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) employees have described how work on climate change is grinding to a halt at the agency, with programs being scrapped and fears that staff may be reassigned away from climate-related tasks.

The Trump administration is tearing up key planks of Barack Obama’s emissions-lowering agenda, with the president withdrawing the US from the Paris climate agreement last week and tasking the EPA with rewriting the clean power plan, which aims to curb greenhouse gases from coal-fired power plants.

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Climate work at the EPA is being systematically targeted for elimination, according to Alyssa Hall, who was the climate change adaption coordinator for EPA’s region one, which encompasses New England, until last month.

“I felt like we were being attacked on a daily basis from headquarters. A lot of my projects were being cancelled or postponed indefinitely, so I was left with nothing to do,” Hall told the Guardian.

Hall worked on integrating climate change considerations into the EPA’s programs, better preparing the agency for a world with higher temperatures, rising seas and more intense storms. But the change in direction under the incoming Trump administration was like “whiplash”, she said, with staff afraid of even using the term “climate change” in emails.

“If it was a project associated with climate change, people at headquarters would pick up the phone rather than email,” she said. “Staff were paranoid that their programs were going to get cut if they mentioned climate change. One day it was fine and then it was like you were being slapped in the face every day.”

Hall, who now works in the private sector, said that “everyone knows” at the agency that climate change staff will be sent to other areas. The EPA has reportedly started moving climate adaption employees to new roles, although an agency spokesman said he would not comment on rumors of reassignments. The climate change division and the climate protection partnership division sits within the EPA’s office of air and radiation.

Scott Pruitt, the EPA administrator, has launched what he calls a “back to basics” strategy at the agency where focus shifts from climate change to basic functions such as cleaning up toxic sites and addressing air and water pollution.

Pruitt was a key proponent of abandoning the Paris deal and spoke after Trump’s confirmed the US’s exit at the White House last week to praise the president for his “unflinching commitment to put America first”.

Pruitt later toured various TV interviews on Sunday to defend leaving the voluntary accord to lower emissions, a move that has been widely criticized by businesses such as Facebook and Goldman Sachs and environmentalists but praised by leading Republicans.

“This is not a message to anyone in the world that America should be apologetic of its CO2 position,” Pruitt said. “We’re actually making tremendous advances. We’re just not going to agree to frameworks and agreements that put us at an economic disadvantage and hurt citizens across this country.”

Pruitt repeatedly refused to say whether Trump – who has expressed climate scepticism numerous times – accepted the mainstream science of climate change. The EPA administrator has previously denied that carbon dioxide is the primary driver of warming temperatures, a stance contrary to established scientific evidence and, until a recent review of content took down the page, the EPA’s own website.

An EPA air quality scientist, who did not want to be named, said the leadership of the agency “seems to have disdain for our work” and claimed that climate change tasks were being wound down.

“All action at the agency on climate has effectively stopped; the only thing that hasn’t is the collection of emissions data,” the scientist told the Guardian. “Climate work has been de-emphasized and halted. There was a climate conference in Atlanta last month and EPA employees were told not to go, so even simple interactions are coming to an end.”

The scientist said many of his colleagues “no longer respect our administrator”.

“He’s made public statements that are counterfactual; he doesn’t seem to understand basic science,” the scientist said. “There are no lines of authority any more. Pruitt makes statements in public, but I don’t take my orders through the media.

“There’s a sizeable group at the EPA worried about out jobs an the ability of the agency to perform its core role. I don’t think the administration is serious about protecting human health, but I am, and I’m going to keep at it.”

The administration’s budget proposal calls for the EPA’s funding to be cut by a third, eliminating dozens of programs such as climate change, anti-pollution efforts at the Great Lakes and Gulf of Mexico and severely paring back money going to toxic cleanups, known as Superfund sites.

Some former EPA employees have expressed concern that the agency’s basic civil and criminal enforcement actions would be undone by a budget that axes money used to help bring cases against errant polluters.

Cynthia Giles, who was an EPA assistant administrator for the office of enforcement in the Obama administration, said the the budget would prevent major EPA cases such as the successful pursuit of BP over the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill and Volkswagen over the emissions cheating scandal.

“To bring cases you need money for monitoring equipment, engineering issues, management of millions of documents – all that would be zeroed out in this budget,” Giles told the Guardian.

“Enforcement is focused on the biggest threats to public health, cases the states can’t and won’t do. The message this budget sends is that enforcement laws aren’t a priority for this administration, which is very concerning.”

The EPA’s 2018 budget is very unlikely to exactly mirror the Trump administration’s request, however, with Congress set to craft its own version this year.