13. Environmental Protection Agency · Notable

Eliminate the Office of Public Engagement and Environmental Education

Done

Printed page 421 13. Environmental Protection Agency

“Eliminating the Office of Public Engagement and Environmental Education as a stand-alone entity and reabsorbing substantive elements into the Office of Public Affairs.”

What has happened

Jun 30, 2026 Done
The office is gone and its work sits where the Mandate wanted it. EPA's Office of the Administrator now lists seven offices and none of them is the Office of Public Engagement and Environmental Education. The environmental education program survives as the Environmental Education and Stewardship Division of the Office of External Affairs — the agency's press and communications office, alongside its Digital, Risk Communications, and Press Division. The receiving office carries a different name from the Mandate's "Office of Public Affairs", but it is the same function.
- EPA, About the Office of External Affairs — six divisions including the Environmental Education and Stewardship Division and the Digital, Risk Communications, and Press Division
  Primary Executive branch Jun 30, 2026
- EPA, About the Office of the Administrator — seven offices, no Office of Public Engagement and Environmental Education
  Primary Executive branch Jun 26, 2026
Sep 1, 2025 Partially done
EPA's reorganization addendum sets out the restructured Office of the Administrator: seven offices, one of them an Associate Administrator for External Affairs. The Office of Public Engagement and Environmental Education is not among them and is not named anywhere in the document. The stand-alone office is gone on paper; where its substantive elements landed is not yet stated.
- EPA FY2026 Congressional Justification addendum: AO restructured into seven offices, including an Associate Administrator for External Affairs
  Primary Executive branch Sep 1, 2025
- EPA Announces Next Phase of Organizational Improvements … (2025-05-02: reorganization of the Office of the Administrator announced)
  Primary Executive branch May 2, 2025

Research log

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

Research notes

The receiving office is not called the Office of Public Affairs any more. EPA folded public affairs and public engagement together into one Office of External Affairs, so the substantive elements landed in the agency’s public-affairs function under a new name. That is the arrangement the Quote describes, reached by consolidating both offices rather than by moving one into the other.
The rule that a rename is not an elimination cuts the other way here: the eliminated entity did not survive under a new name — the environmental education function survives, one division deep, inside a communications office.
Same reorganization as #1043 (OEJECR) and #1048; the umbrella item is #1052.

Action: eliminate
Object: Office of Public Engagement and Environmental Education
ID: 1047