U.S. Environmental Protection Agency employees gathered in downtown Chicago this week to protest plans to cut its staff and budget as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the size of the federal government.

Lee Zelden, the EPA administrator, has said he wants to cut the agency’s budget by 65%. “We don’t need the money,” he said in an interview with Fox News.

Multiple news organizations have reported the EPA plans to eliminate its scientific research office, which would mean at least 1,000 chemists, biologists, toxicologists and other scientists could be fired.

The agency also announced plans to slash its environmental justice programs, which help protect the communities most affected by things like pollution and climate change.

Some EPA employees worry the cuts could compromise fundamental functions of the agency tasked with protecting the air, water and health of the country.

WBEZ’s Juanpablo Ramirez Franco sat down with Ellie Hagen, an environmental scientist in the environmental justice program at the EPA’s Chicago office. Hagen says she’s working and is still getting paid, but she believes her job is going to be eliminated. In her interview, Hagen stated that she was representing herself and her union and not the EPA.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

You help do community outreach work at the EPA. Tell us a little bit about what drew you to this job.

I was really lucky to grow up in a family who cared a lot about nature. I grew up outside a lot. Later in my life, I realized the impact that the environment has on people’s health. My mom got diagnosed with breast cancer when I was very young, and she ended up passing away from a rare and serious form of breast cancer called inflammatory breast cancer. When I graduated, I started working on a site in a rural town, in Portsmouth, Ohio, and I found out that my mom had actually worked [at the same site].

My mom was one of three geologists who was taking samples at a site where there was a plant that produced uranium for the Cold War. So, it was contaminated with a lot of nuclear contamination and chemicals like trichloroethylene, or TCE. [The geologists were] taking a lot of the samples to characterize the extent of the contamination, and all three of those geologists ended up getting rare and serious forms of cancer, and two of them passed away. So, that’s where my passion for environmental health and environmental justice was born.

The Trump administration has announced plans to eliminate the environmental justice program at the EPA. That program was started in 1992 under President George H.W. Bush, a Republican. Why is this particular program being targeted for cuts?

I think there’s this narrative that environmental justice is a political issue or a partisan issue, but it’s not. I think regardless of what side of the aisle you’re on, everyone deserves clean air, everyone deserves clean water, everyone deserves clean land to live on. That’s not a partisan or political issue.

Can you give us an example of how these proposed cuts might affect the public?

The Midwest has a lot of Rust Belt towns where there was historic pollution from things like mining or smelting activities, and that can cause lead and other heavy metals to accumulate in the soil and just sit there. So, there’s a lot of legacy pollution.

I have a memory from a town in Ohio: A mother came in with her children and a soil sample she collected where her kids like to dig and play. I screened that soil sample — the result was around 1,000 parts per million of lead, and for context, the national average [for lead soil levels] is around 30 parts per million of lead.

I remember seeing the devastated look on her face [when she learned] that her kids were potentially exposed to [lead]. Being able to respond directly to community needs and community concerns to help keep people safe and keep people’s environments safer is what the environmental justice program does. With these cuts, I don’t think there’s anyone who’s going to be prioritizing these communities anymore.

Do you think the agency will be able to carry out its job, including things that are required by law, amid all these cuts?

Administrator Zeldin has said, ‘We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion … unleashing American energy and bringing back auto jobs to the U.S.’ Bringing back auto jobs to the U.S. is not a law that we have. It’s hard to understand how we’re expected to implement that when our mission is to protect human health and the environment.

I think what we’re seeing is this kind of false assertion that we have to choose between a prosperous economy and a prosperous environment. We’re the richest country in the world. We don’t have to make that choice. I think deregulating and degrading our environment does not make us more efficient. It doesn’t make us stronger. It only makes us sicker and it makes us weaker.

Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco covers climate change and the environment for WBEZ and Grist. Follow him on X at @__juanpab.