13. Environmental Protection Agency · Notable
Eliminate the Office of Emergency Management and reassign its functions
Printed page 433 13. Environmental Protection Agency
“Eliminate the Office of Emergency Management and reassign its functions. … Move the emergency management function (currently OEM) into Homeland Security under the Administrator’s office. … Incorporate removal authority (currently OEM) into OSRTI.”
What has happened
- Done
The Office of Emergency Management no longer exists. EPA's OLEM page lists five suboffices — the Office of Superfund and Emergency Management, the Office of Resource Conservation and Recovery, the Office of Underground Storage Tanks, the Office of Brownfields and Land Revitalization, and the Office of Mountains, Deserts and Plains — and no OEM. OSEM now holds both the Superfund removal and remedial work and the emergency response function, including the Environmental Response Team and a Response Readiness and Development Division, which is the Quote's "incorporate removal authority into OSRTI"; the remaining continuity-of-government and operations-center functions sit in the Administrator's new Office of National Security and Operations Coordination, which is the Quote's "move the emergency management function into Homeland Security under the Administrator's office".
- Attempted
The FY 2026 CJ reorganization addendum set out the plan: EPA would merge two OLEM emergency response teams and move them, with several functions of the Office of Emergency Management, into a renamed Office of Superfund and Emergency Management, move certain other OEM functions to the Office of the Administrator, and move the Federal Facilities Restoration/Reuse Office back into OSRTI/OSEM. The addendum is written in the future tense; nothing had happened yet.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
- Dated done from EPA’s own OLEM page rather than from an announcement: EPA never issued a press release naming OEM’s abolition, and the page (last updated 2026-08-17) is the Primary record that the office is gone and where its functions went. It is the same reading applied to #1043.
- The Quote’s three clauses are all answered, though the Administrator’s office unit is called the Office of National Security and Operations Coordination rather than “Homeland Security”.
- #1138, on the same page, asks for the parent office’s name to change and is not started: OLEM is still OLEM.
- Action
- eliminate
- Object
- EPA Office of Emergency Management (OEM)
- ID
- 1137