What’s “essential” to Trump’s EPA? More mercury pollution.

As thousands of EPA workers are sent home during the shutdown, the ones dismantling mercury rules for coal plants are still clocking in.

Oct 22, 2025

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Stacks from the Hugh L. Spurlock Generating Station in Maysville, Kentucky, a 1.3-gigawatt coal power plant. Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

The Environmental Protection Agency’s work protecting clean air and water is grinding to a halt.

As the government shutdown enters its fourth week, thousands of EPA workers are receiving notice they’ll be sent home. Furlough notices are “widespread” across the EPA, E&E News reported on Monday, “including a large percentage of staffers in EPA’s air and water offices.”

The exact number of furloughed EPA employees is about 4,000, or about 27 percent of the agency’s workforce, Politico reported. The agency would not confirm or deny that number. (Asked for details about which EPA employees have been sent home, the EPA’s press secretary refused, telling Inside Climate News it was “a ridiculous question to ask.”)

More employees are likely to be sent home as the shutdown continues. The Trump administration’s latest shutdown contingency plan considers nearly 90 percent of the EPA’s workforce to be “non-essential” or “partially essential,” and therefore eligible for furlough. “Many activities will halt, including research and the publication of research results, and the issuance of new grants, contracts and permits,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “Critically, civil enforcement inspections—on-site visits to facilities to check their compliance with environmental regulations—will also cease.”

Furloughs are also just the latest blow to the EPA’s workforce. Before the shutdown, 4,000 EPA employees had already been fired or had taken a buyout. The agency’s climate offices and its scientific research arm are also in the process of being disbanded. And the bleeding is expected to continue if and when the government reopens; The Trump administration has proposed a 55 percent cut to EPA funding in its 2026 budget request.

But there is at least one group of EPA employees who the Trump administration considers “essential,” and are still on the job: the people making it legal for coal plants to release more mercury into the environment.

The detail was first reported Friday by Lisa Friedman at the New York Times. Despite the widespread stoppage of climate, environmental and public health work during the shutdown, she reported, “the workers responsible for carrying out the president’s plans for more fossil fuels and less wind and solar power are still hard at work.”

Specifically, at the EPA, Friedman reported that “employees are finalizing a plan to allow more mercury emissions from coal plants, according to two people familiar with the work underway.”

Friedman is referring to Trump’s plan to repeal the 2024 Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) rule. The 2024 MATS rule, implemented by the Biden administration, strengthened older pollution regulations on coal- and oil-fired power plants. In addition to placing stricter limits on mercury pollution, the 2024 rule required coal companies to install systems that continually monitor emissions. It also eliminated a loophole that allowed coal plants to exceed pollution limits when starting up.

In June, Trump’s EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced plans to repeal the strengthened mercury regulations, arguing they were created only to kill the coal industry. “The primary purpose of these Biden-Harris administration regulations was to destroy industries that didn’t align with their narrow-minded climate change zealotry,” Zeldin said in a statement.

In reality, the regulations were designed to protect kids from being poisoned. Mercury is a highly dangerous neurotoxin that causes developmental problems in infants and damages children’s brains. No amount of exposure is safe.

Once emitted by coal plants into the air, mercury then settles into waterways, contaminates fish, and lingers in ecosystems for decades. Mercury pollution from coal plants is the primary reason why tuna and swordfish are considered unsafe for pregnant and other vulnerable people to consume.

One recent study estimated that emissions from coal are costing Americans $13 billion to $26 billion per year in additional ER visits, strokes and cardiac events, and a greater prevalence and severity of childhood asthma events. That’s why the EPA has spent decades reducing mercury pollution.

But now, even with the government closed, Trump and Zeldin are racing to let coal plants release more mercury into the air. And they’re doing it for one reason: Because the coal industry asked them to.

Trump loves to talk about how he’s bringing back “clean” coal. As he infamously said in his speech to the U.N. last month, ”I have a little standing order in the White House: Never use the word coal. Only use the words: Clean, beautiful coal. Sounds much better, doesn’t it?”

But “clean” coal doesn’t exist. And even if it did, it wouldn’t describe what Trump and Zeldin are bringing back.

For the last year, coal companies have been explicitly asking Trump to make coal dirtier—and Trump has been complying. Back in March, Trump’s EPA sent a blast notification to coal companies, telling them if they wanted to be exempted from pollution requirements like the mercury standard, all they had to do was ask.

The EPA even provided an email template that coal companies could use to make their request.

A New York Times article describes the process by which the Trump administration is allowing coal companies to request exemptions from pollution regulations.

Since then, Trump has personally granted temporary exemptions from the 2024 Mercury Air Toxic Standards for 68 coal plants—representing more than a third of U.S. coal-fired capacity, according to Utility Dive.

These temporary exemptions likely explain why the EPA is rushing to permanently repeal the 2024 mercury standards, even during a government shutdown. Because if those temporary exemptions are allowed to expire, coal companies will be forced to comply with strong pollution laws.

This is what it looks like when the fossil fuel industry doesn’t just lobby the government, but becomes the government. The agency designed to protect people from pollution gets turned into a customer service department for coal—even when the entire government is shut down. The shutdown itself has many moving parts, and it’s easy for stories like this to get lost in the shuffle. But the quiet dismantling of protections for children’s health is one that will leave a lasting mark.

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Other stories I’m following:

The government is shut down. But not for fossil fuels. (New York Times, October 17).
More than 700,000 federal employees have been sidelined and thousands more are at risk of being fired as the government shutdown drags on. But the workers responsible for carrying out the president’s plans for more fossil fuels and less wind and solar power are still hard at work. Some are approving permits for companies that want to extract metals, coal, oil and gas from public lands and federal waters. Others are rolling back limits on the greenhouse gas emissions that are driving climate change.
Meat consumption in U.S. cities produces as much climate pollution as powering homes. (Sentient Media, October 21).
America’s city dwellers produce similar levels of greenhouse gas emissions when they eat meat and power their homes, a new study published in Nature Climate Change suggests….The study found that the total climate impact for U.S. cities [from eating meat] is 329 megatons of CO2 equivalent, while the total emissions that come from using fossil fuels to light, heat, cool and power appliances in U.S. city homes is 334 megatons.
Good news: you don’t have to give up eating beef. (Bloomberg, October 22).
We could reduce meat’s climate impact by up to 43% simply by occasionally eating chicken or pork instead of beef, which accounts for 73% of meat-related pollution, and by cutting food waste in half. Or maybe we could keep a little more beef in our diet but just throw less than half of it in the trash. Those emissions savings could amount to something like 142 megatons of CO2 equivalent per year. Congratulations: You have just eliminated the annual pollution of Ukraine, Nigeria or the Netherlands.
Isabelle Boemeke isn’t trying to spread conspiracy theories in her new pro-nuclear book, but she is. (Drilled, October 14).
Pro-nuclear influencer Isabelle Boemeke’s new book, Rad Future, indulges in conspiracy theories, unsourced claims, and personal attacks against the industry’s critics. … Drilled sought to contact the publisher and a publicist representing Boemeke to ask about these issues and other factual inaccuracies, but did not receive a response.

Catch of the Day: Your periodic reminder that this section is named after Fish, an extremely good boy and companion of my best friend/former roomie/HEATED reader Lara.

Fish loves hanging out in Seattle’s Gas Works Park, which is located (perhaps fittingly for today’s newsletter) on the site of a former coal gasification plant, which made synthetic gas out of coal. Here’s a great article from Curbed Seattle on how the city constructed the park from the remnants of such a polluted site.