Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

13. Environmental Protection Agency · Minor

Announce a plan to streamline EPA's laboratory structure

Partially done

437 13. Environmental Protection Agency

“Announce plans to streamline and reform EPA’s poorly coordinated and managed laboratory structure.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    EPA announced laboratory changes in the President's first budget and again in the reorganization addendum, but not a plan to reform the laboratory structure. The FY 2026 Congressional Justification announces vacating the Houston regional laboratory and consolidating it into the Ada, Oklahoma facility, and vacating the Human Studies Facility in Chapel Hill; the CJ addendum centralizes all facility management for the Research Triangle Park and Cincinnati laboratories in the new Office of Finance and Administration under a Chief Facilities and Security Officer; and ORD's research laboratories now appear on EPA's laboratories page as five geographically named Environmental Science Laboratories. The structure itself is unchanged: ORD is still the National Program Manager for ten regional laboratories, the program offices still run their own laboratories, and no coordination or reform plan was published.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • One negative search covered the whole cluster of EPA science, appointee and advisory-body asks on pp. 436-437.
  • Read as delivery of a piece: real, dated, announced laboratory consolidations, but announced as budget and facilities decisions rather than as the streamlining and reform plan the Quote asks for.
  • #1135, on p. 432, asks for the regional laboratories themselves to be eliminated or consolidated and is partial on the Houston consolidation.
Action
other
Object
EPA laboratory structure
ID
1164