'A pandemic-level shock to the system': RFK Jr's old environmental group weighs EPA cuts

Source: The Guardian

Mon 31 Mar 2025 08.00 EDT
Last modified on Mon 31 Mar 2025 08.03 EDT


Donald Trump’s push to repurpose the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) amid funding cuts and staffing losses poses a huge threat to water safety and environmental advances in one of the big environmental success stories in the US in recent decades: the clean-up of the Hudson River.

Once a byword for environmental degradation, the Hudson River is now recovering, in part due to the work of Riverkeeper, a non-profit environmental organization that established a model of legal activism for water protection and inspired more than 300 programs globally. It is also where Robert F Kennedy Jr cut his teeth as an environmental lawyer, before becoming a senior member of Trump’s rightwing cabinet.

The political threat to America’s environment generally and more specifically the work of Riverkeeper has shocked the organization’s president, Tracy Brown, who spoke to the Guardian from its headquarters in the Hudson River commuter town of Ossining. She was mulling the impact of EPA administrator Lee Zeldin’s latest salvo: the termination of $14bn in Biden-initiated grants to three climate groups, now blocked by a federal judge, alongside plans to eliminate 1,155 chemists, biologists, toxicologists, and other scientists from the EPA’s office of research and development.

“No one at the EPA was prepared to be so attacked and cannibalized by their own leadership and they don’t have a playbook on how to cope. It’s hard to get one’s head around what we’re losing here in terms of resources, momentum, knowledge and trust. It’s a pandemic-level shock to the system, and the effects could last for decades,” Brown said.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/31/epa-cuts-environment-rivers-water-trump