The budgets of the EPA, NOAA and FEMA would all be slashed, as would incentives for renewable energy.
President Trump’s annual budget request to Congress continues his administration’s defunding of climate change programs, environmental protection and renewable energy, slashing the budgets of the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The spending plan for fiscal 2027 “builds on the President’s vision by continuing to constrain non-defense spending,” wrote Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, in a foreword to the 92-page document, which includes an historic, $1.5 trillion defense budget, an increase of 44 percent.
EPA spending would be cut in half under Trump’s proposal, released Friday, and grants from the agency would be slashed by $1 billion. Congress rejected a similar budget request from the president last year.
An Inside Climate News analysis of federal workforce data released by the Office of Personnel Management shows that EPA lost more than 4,000 employees in the first year of Trump’s second term, reducing its workforce to 12,849, its lowest level since the 1980s. The 24 percent reduction was more than double the rate of losses across the entire federal government.
“This EPA budget proposal leaves families sicker, not safer,” said Michelle Roos, a former EPA project manager and current executive director of the Environmental Protection Network, an organization of former EPA employees. “This is part of the Trump administration’s dangerous and far-reaching plan to let polluters decide which toxic chemicals to dump in our drinking water, which harmful pollution to pump into the air we breathe, and which pesticides are put on the food we eat.”
Trump’s proposed budget would also cut $449 million from renewable energy funding and re-propose canceling $15 billion in renewable energy infrastructure funding under the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which Trump has called part of a “Green New Scam.”
“The U.S. Government will no longer subsidize intermittent energy forms that destabilize the grid or Green New Scam projects,” Trump’s budget proposal said. “Instead, the Budget pushes an aggressive America First agenda that would combat foreign influence through robust domestic critical material supply chains, as well as revitalize the Nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve.”
To date, the Trump administration has moved to discontinue tax credits and other incentives provided under Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act for renewable energy and electric vehicles and has taken aggressive action to halt three offshore wind programs under construction off the U.S. coast in the Atlantic Ocean.
Most recently, the Trump administration has offered France’s Total Energy $928 million to forfeit leases on wind farms off the East Coast if the company reinvests those funds in U.S. oil and gas projects.
Meanwhile, since Trump began bombing Iran on Feb. 28 and, in retaliation, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil and gas is shipped, gasoline prices in the U.S. have increased by more than $1 at the pump across the country, an increase of 35 percent in just over a month.
Beyond the EPA cuts, Trump’s budget plan includes cuts of $1.6 billion for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which it said has “consistently funded efforts to radicalize students against markets.” The budget also cut $1.3 billion from Federal Emergency Management Agency grants, and $1 billion from Environmental Protection Agency grants and $1 billion from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which, the document said, “has long funded awards for the development of curricula that advance a radical climate agenda.” It also proposes eliminating the $4 billion Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program.
The National Energy Assistance Directors Association said eliminating the low-income home energy assistance program “would deepen the nation’s energy affordability crisis and leave millions of vulnerable households without the assistance they need.”
In a statement on Friday, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said Trump’s proposal, which cuts roughly $100 billion from non-defense discretionary spending, “isn’t a serious plan” and “isn’t worthy of the American people.” The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said the president’s proposal was “missing any significant plan for how to address the major drivers of our spending and deficit growth.” The conservative Cato Institute said that “Trump’s budget falls short on the spending programs driving the federal debt.”
The American Public Health Association said that Trump’s proposal “threatens all aspects of the public’s health” and “should be dead on arrival.” The Sierra Club said Trump’s budget “fails to adequately fund the agencies and programs tasked with protecting our clean air and drinking water.”
A spokesperson for the Ocean Conservancy told the website Seafood Source, “Slashing NOAA’s budget would weaken weather forecasting, disrupt fisheries management and stall ocean research—putting American lives, livelihoods, and global scientific leadership at risk.”
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/06042026/trump-budget-proposes-epa-noaa-fema-cuts/
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