Trump said he wants ‘clean air.’ Then he fired America’s clean air workforce.

I was fired along with hundreds of colleagues for no reason.

Credit: engel.ac & berkahjayamaterial / Adobe Stock

By Sophia from Home of the Brave

Until recently, I was employed by a federal contractor working on improving US air quality. We had hundreds of employees who supported the Environmental Protection Agency, helping track atmospheric hazards and ensure the air Americans breathe is safe and free of toxins. It was the kind of job that gives you a sense of purpose; a place where you knew that the work you’re doing everyday has real, tangible impacts for all sorts of Americans.

And then, abruptly, hundreds of us were fired. Donald Trump’s and Elon Musk’s DOGE cuts caused our company to lay off hundreds of employees, including everyone in my division working on these issues—more than 400 people in all. I lost my job too, the very first “adult” job I’d gotten since coming out of college. It wasn’t how I had envisioned wrapping up my time there, and the suddenness of it was a shock and a disappointment.

When people ask me about how I’ve been coping with all this, I’m honest: It sucks. It really sucks to find meaning and purpose in a job, only to have the rug ripped out from under your feet. It sucks to watch your friends and colleagues—some of whom have been doing this work for decades—unceremoniously thrown out of their jobs by no fault of their own. And the uncertainty of what comes next for all of us certainly sucks, too.

Worse than losing my job, though, are the effects that I know these firings will have on the broader public. The EPA’s air quality work has a direct bearing on people’s health outcomes. Poor air quality can lead to birth defects, asthma, heart and respiratory conditions, autoimmune disorders, and more. Often these effects are the worst among America’s most vulnerable populations, the people with the least resources to catch things early and ensure they are treated.

This is all deeply ironic. When Donald Trump ran for president, he didn’t always sound like your typical Republican. He talked about wanting to have “clean air and clean water.” I never supported him, but this kind of rhetoric at least gave the impression that he might not go out of his way to gut the EPA’s workforce and contractors. But it turns out the whole “clean air and clean water” thing was a lie.

Beyond the environment, Trump’s cuts hurt my company in other ways. More than 200 people supporting the US Agency for International Development also lost their jobs, and recently the agency was officially shuttered and folded into the State Department. As some of its former employees wrote, this is going to mean more lives needlessly lost around the world, including people who “died due to preventable diseases, starvation, and HIV/AIDS.”

All of these cuts were made in the interest of boosting “efficiency” in government. But they are actually going to make it harder and more expensive to respond to environmental challenges in the future. Without the expertise and personnel in place to track and respond to air quality issues, we’re going to be ill-prepared for environmental hazards down the road, and the health challenges they create. With these cuts, we’ve willingly blinded ourselves to the risks that could be coming. That’s not efficiency, it’s stupidity.

By some estimates, the EPA’s workforce is now down to 1980s levels—a time before I was born. This is going to have serious long-term consequences, and ordinary Americans are the ones who are going to suffer. It didn't have to be this way.

Sophia is a former federal contractor and a participant in Home of the Brave, a project showcasing real people speaking out against Donald Trump’s disastrous agenda.