One hundred and sixty-eight employees at the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Environmental Justice were placed on administrative leave on Thursday, according to agency officials.
The notification of leave, sent via email to employees about 5 p.m., was a major step in President Trump’s widely expected plan to do away with the office. On his first day back in the White House, he signed an executive order to eliminate all government programs on environmental justice, which are aimed at helping poor and minority communities that are face disproportionate amounts of pollution. These communities are often located near industrial areas or other heavily contaminated places.
“E.P.A. is working to diligently implement President Trump’s executive orders, including the ‘Ending Radical and Wasteful Government D.E.I. Programs and Preferencing,” said Molly Vaseliou, an E.P.A. spokeswoman, in a statement, referring to a directive to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs. “President Trump was elected with a mandate from the American people to do just this.”
Ms. Vaseliou said that the work of the staffers placed on leave “did not relate to the agency’s statutory duties or grant work.”
Many of the agency’s additional 100 or so environmental justice employees who work in its regional offices around the country are expected to be the next in line to be placed on administrative leave, said two people familiar with the agency’s plans, who spoke anonymously out of fear of retaliation.
By law, no employee can be on administrative leave for more than 10 days in a year. Observers said they interpret the administrative leave notices as a first step toward the eventual shuttering the office.
In an executive order that jointly called for rolling back environmental justice programs and diversity, equity and inclusion programs, Mr. Trump called such initiatives “unpopular, inflationary, illegal, and radical practices,” adding, “climate extremism has exploded inflation and overburdened businesses with regulation.”
An online screening and mapping tool used by the environmental justice office, called “EJScreen,” had been taken down as of Wednesday night.
Earlier this week, the E.P.A. notified about 1,100 career employees who had been hired in the past year and had probationary status that they could be “fired immediately.” That number appeared likely to include a large number of employees of the office of environmental justice, which was created in 2022 under the Biden administration.
Employees at the Energy Department’s office of energy equity, which is intended to ensure that poor and minority communities have access to affordable energy, were placed on administrative leave on Jan. 23.
Employees at the Justice Department’s small office of environmental justice have also been placed on administrative leave.
As Elon Musk, the head of the Trump administration’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” has employed aggressive tactics to compel government workers to resign, a member of Mr. Musk’s team, Cole Killian, has begun to hold meetings with E.P.A. employees.
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“Environmental justice is a critical part of E.P.A.’s mission and we will steadfastly fight to ensure the agency has the funding and staff it needs to protect those hurt first and worst by the impacts of pollution and climate change as well as all Americans,” said Margie Alt, director of the Climate Action Campaign, an advocacy group.
The E.P.A.’s Office of Environmental Justice had its roots in the agency’s former Office of Environmental Equity, established in 1992 by a Republican president, George H.W. Bush. In the following decades, the office worked to address the impacts of toxic air and water pollution on marginalized communities located near heavily polluted areas, such as power plants, factories, highways, ports and chemical facilities.
The office got a boost under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who signed a climate 2022 law that included $60 billion for environmental justice.
Michael S. Regan, the Biden administration’s E.P.A. administrator and the second Black person to hold that role, made environmental justice his signature issue. He took a “journey to justice” to low-income communities in Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, as part of a push to step up monitoring and enforcement of federal rules regarding air and water quality.,
“Seeing the situation for myself, talking directly to community members, it is startling where we get to this point — the point where children miss school days because the water isn’t safe,” Mr. Regan said at the time. He called the environmental conditions he had witnessed in many parts of the nation “unacceptable in the United States of America.”
Mr. Regan enlarged the size, scope and legal authority of the environmental justice office.
Its staffing grew from 55 to 200 people, in Washington and across the agency’s 10 regional offices. That put the expanded environmental justice office on equal footing with the E.P.A.’s national offices of air, water and chemical pollution, which together make up the agency’s central mission of reducing pollution and protecting public health.
As a sign of his commitment to the issue, Mr. Regan announced the creation of the office in Warren County, N.C., the site of a toxic dump where protesters were arrested 40 years ago, giving rise to the environmental justice movement.
