Report: Proposed EPA Cuts Further Imperil Environmental Protections in Cash-Strapped States - DeSmog
As Trump pushes to slash the EPA’s budget to its lowest level in four decades, 15 years of state-level cuts have already hollowed out environmental enforcement across the country.
By Joe Fassler
onDec 12, 2025 @ 12:55 PST
 An LNG carrier at Cheniere’s Corpus Christi LNG terminal in Gregory, Texas, which emitted 3.3 million tons of greenhouse gases in 2023. Texas is one of 27 states that’s cut environmental agency budgets by a third or more, a new report finds. Credit: Julie Dermansky
Massive cuts at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have hampered state-level regulators’ ability to rein in pollution, according to a new report. And now, with the Trump administration pushing for even deeper cuts at the agency in 2026, many states across the country may be in a dire position.
“If EPA’s capacity to do its job is further diminished, how prepared are our states to shoulder more responsibility for protecting us from these threats? Unfortunately, not well,” Jen Duggan, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP), the nonprofit behind the report, said in a Wednesday press conference on the findings.
The report found that 27 state governments have cut environmental agency funding over the past 15 years, including seven states — Texas, Wyoming, Iowa, Alabama, Connecticut, South Dakota, and Mississippi — that have cut budgets by a third or more. And 31 states cut staff totals at their environmental agencies, collectively eliminating 3,725 roles in that same period.
That leaves them vulnerable to Trump administration changes at the EPA, which has already seen its budget cut 40 percent between 2010 and 2025. In 2025 alone, EPA staffers have left in droves, thanks to mass firings, layoffs, and resignations — as much as 33 percent of its total staff, according to some estimates. Meanwhile, the White House has proposed cutting the agency’s budget by 55 percent in 2026 to $4.2 billion, its lowest level of funding in four decades.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has suggested that states will be able to pick up the slack, describing a vision for the agency that involves giving “power back to states to make their own decisions.” In a March press conference announcing a major deregulation initiative — what he called “the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen” — Zeldin fundamentally recast EPA’s mission, outlining a new mandate to “unleash American energy” and “revitalize the American auto industry.”
Protecting Americans from the impacts of industry pollution, he suggested, would instead fall to state agencies, which are “best positioned to work with unique communities and implement laws.”
“In too many instances and across too many administrations, EPA has retained control of implementing many laws from its perch in the nation’s capital,” he said, in an address to the Environmental Council of the States, a national nonprofit organization representing environmental agency leaders, later that month. “It’s this kind of common sense reform I want to partner with states to achieve.”
In its report, EIP argues that this stance ignores EPA’s statutorily defined mission to protect the health and well-being of Americans, while downplaying the crucial role it plays in outlining national standards and coordinating efforts related to complex, multi-state problems. Even more significantly, though, according to the report, many states are simply not equipped to address their challenges without a strong federal partner.
“This kind of handoff — from federal to state — can only work if the teammate receiving the baton has not been hobbled, as many state environmental agencies have been, by budget cuts,” the report’s authors write.
Twenty three states have in fact worked to increase environmental funding since 2010 — with California (364 percent increase), Colorado (111 percent increase), and Vermont (109 percent increase) leading the way. Which means future cuts to the EPA would likely have a disproportionate impact on states like Mississippi and South Dakota, which have cut agency funding by 71 percent and 61 percent, respectively.
In the Wednesday press conference convened by EIP, environmental advocates painted a broad picture of state-level regulatory dysfunction that would only be made worse by further federal cuts.
The proposed cuts are “a recipe for disaster in states like ours, where the state agency is already stretched thin,” Drew Ball, southeast campaigns director for the National Resources Defense Council of North Carolina, where environmental agency funding had already declined 32 percent since 2010, said at EIP’s news conference.
“It’s like dismantling the fire department while the house is already burning.”
Credit: “State of Decline: Cuts to state pollution control agencies compound damage from the dismantling of EPA,” Environmental Integrity ProjectStates depend on a variety of EPA grants to help fund their compliance efforts, ensuring that standards under the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and other laws are met. The Trump administration has proposed cutting EPA “categorical grants” by approximately $1 billion, eliminating nearly all federal funding for a range of issues, from air quality management and pollution control to brownfield management and lead abatement.
That recommendation would “devastate economic development, critical infrastructure, and environmental protections across the nation,” representatives from the Environmental Council of the States wrote in an open letter to Zeldin in May.
In the Wednesday press conference, Kathryn Guerra of Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group, said her state of Texas already suffers from widespread regulatory noncompliance. According to its own enforcement reports, she said, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) never investigates many of the environmental complaints it receives, while its backlog of unresolved enforcement cases has grown to over 1,400.
“The funding cuts to TCEQ described in this report render the agency largely ineffective, and cuts to the EPA will worsen that ineffectiveness,” she said.
Meanwhile, both houses of Congress are recommending much less severe EPA cuts. The House Appropriations Committee has recommended cutting the agency’s budget by 23 percent in 2026, while its counterpart in the Senate has voted for just a 5 percent reduction. But the advocates convened by EIP argued that current levels of funding are already critically low.
“This report is a warning,” said Jennifer Walling, chief executive officer for the Illinois Environmental Council. “If both lines of defense, our state agencies and the U.S. EPA are weakened at the same time, pollution enforcement will falter, emergencies will happen, and public health will suffer. We cannot pretend that states are prepared to shoulder this burden alone.” |
