The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is down more than 700 career staffers so far this year, the agency told The Hill.

An EPA spokesperson said that as of Jan. 1, the agency had 17,080 staffers, while as of May 30, it has 16,347 a loss of 733 people.

Some of these departures were already publicly known, as the agency announced in April that it was firing 280 staffers who worked on “environmental justice,” an issue area that tackles pollution in overburdened and underserved communities, including communities of color.

But that means an additional 450 people have left the agency since the start of the year. An EPA spokesperson said the figure may not include the most recent applications for early retirement, since those are still being processed. 

Staffers who are still on the agency’s payroll but are on leave either because they opted to take the “fork in the road” buyout or because they are a probationary worker whose fate is pending in court are counted as still being on staff in the figure provided by the agency.

Further cuts likely loom at the agency as the Trump administration as a whole seeks to shrink the size of the government through reductions in force.

The administration’s proposed budget for the agency suggests payroll cuts of 35 percent for staff working on both science and other environmental programs. 

And the agency is in the process of an ongoing reorganization, though it said that the first step of this reshuffle announced last month did not include layoffs.

“We want to operate as efficiently and effectively as possible,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a video announcing the reorganization last month.

Stan Meiburg, who worked at the EPA for 39 years, told The Hill in an interview that he considered the reduction to be somewhat high for a five month period, describing an attrition rate of about 5 percent over the course of a year to be more normal. 

He added in a follow-up email that he believes the 733 count “understates the loss of capability at EPA and just how disruptive the current situation is on the people who are still there, and wondering if they are next.”

Meiburg, who was a career official for more than 36 years but was a political appointee for two and a half years during the Obama administration, said that the loss of staff could make it more difficult for the agency to do its job of protecting the environment.

“Things are not going to get done and that could be inspections, it could be follow up on accounting things, it could be grants and contracts,” said Meiburg, who is now the executive director at the Sabin Center at Wake Forest University.

Meanwhile, this week, an environmental group is finding even higher job losses over the course of the last year.

The Center for Biological Diversity received two EPA staff directories from an unspecified time in 2024 and in April 2025 through a formal records request from the agency and found a difference of more than 1,500 employees between the two directories. 

The group expressed concerns about what such job losses would mean for the agency.

“The EPA can’t protect American health while losing 10% of its staff in a matter of months. And more firings are planned by the Trump administration,” said Ivan Ditmars, associate attorney at the Center, in a written statement. 

 “Without the scientists and researchers to maintain strong health and environmental standards, polluters will profit while the rest of us suffer from dirtier air and water. As Trump stops policing pollution, we can expect more asthma attacks, lead contamination and all the other harms that EPA experts strive to prevent,” Ditmars added.

The figures provided by EPA and those found in the directory are not necessarily incompatible, especially since it’s not clear when exactly in 2024 the directory comes from.

Meiburg noted that many employees tend to wait for the end of the year to retire.