1,000 EPA Employees Told They Could Be Fired 'Immediately' and I Just Wet Myself

What do you call a thousand bureaucrats about to be given their walking papers?

Say it with me now: "A good start."

The Hill reported early Tuesday that EPA mission support official Kimberly Patrick emailed more than 1,000 employees to inform them that they are “likely on a probationary/trial period," and that "as a probationary/trial period employee, the agency has the right to immediately terminate you."

Here's the way the New York Times framed the story with Lisa Friedman's lead sentence: "The Trump administration has warned more than 1,100 Environmental Protection Agency employees who work on climate change, reducing air pollution, enforcing environmental laws and other programs that they could be fired at any time."

That's not helpful. Friedman described pretty much every job at EPA that isn't about mopping the floors or restocking the toilet paper. Her "informative" lead is just an excuse to get NYT readers all worked up over climate change. Again. As if they need any help.

Civil Eats (whatever that is) pegged the Scare Factor needle with an even more misleading headline: "EPA Tells Employees Working on Climate Change They May be Fired."

No such thing happened, near as anyone can tell, but the "who" in the "who, when, where, what, why, and how" of every good news opener remains a mystery.

President Trump's new EPA commissioner Lee Zeldin said last week, "I’ve been told that the EPA building is often at about 20% capacity on any given day. I’ll be able to confirm that firsthand once I’m in the building." Zeldin added, "Operationally, it’s important to get employees back into the office and working and collaborating."

Trump instructed work-from-home federal employees back into their offices two weeks ago, so I'm guessing that "probationary/trial" employees self-identified by not coming into work as ordered.

But I can only guess.

Sadly, neither the NYT nor The Hill republished, posted, or linked to the full text of Patrick's notice. That might have gone a long way to removing confusion or ambiguity over what's happening at EPA right now, so I'm forced to assume that any confusion or ambiguity is intentional.

(My practice here at VodkaPundit is to republish or link to everything so that you can judge for yourself and, hopefully, leave without any confusion or ambiguity.)

Then again, transparency isn't just a problem with the press. The NYT also reported that "Molly Vaseliou, an E.P.A. spokeswoman, said in a statement that 'our goal is to be transparent,'” but declined to answer the NYT's questions about the email. I like what Trump and Zeldin are doing at EPA but I like — and expect — transparency, too.

The huffy reactions are everything you'd expect.

The New Republic's Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling lamented that Zeldin is "trying to terrify" EPA workers into quitting. Is the expectation that they follow instructions really that terrifying?

President of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) Local Local 704, Nicole Cantello, said, "We’re really concerned, deeply concerned, that the next step will be removing these employees."

No offense, Nicole, but neither your public-sector union job nor your public-sector union should exist.

EPA employs more than 16,000 people, so a headcount reduction of roughly one in 16 is only maybe large enough to be meaningful and certainly small enough not to disrupt the agency's core functions. That's almost a shame, really, since the EPA morphed from cleaning up the country's air, soil, and waterways (awesome!) to trying to gain veto power over every action throughout the entire economy (boo!).

Zeldin said last week, "I don’t believe that anyone should be here at EPA who is not committed to the agency mission and the lawful directives coming from the duly elected president of the United States."

Something tells me 1,000 pink slips might be nothing more than a good start, indeed.