Former EPA lawyer based in Seattle fights Trump-related firing
A former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency attorney who was based in Seattle is among those challenging their firings for signing a letter critical of the Trump administration.
Ted Yackulic worked for the EPA for nearly 36 years and focused on ensuring polluters paid for environmental cleanup. He would help write orders and negotiate agreements to clean up some of the Northwest’s most polluted places.
This summer, he and more than 150 of his colleagues across the U.S. signed a letter advocating for the agency to continue its mission and condemning EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s efforts to dismantle human health and environmental protections and slash the agency’s scientific research and environmental justice programs.
Yackulic and 145 other EPA employees who signed the letter were reportedly placed on administrative leave in July. Nine probationary employees were fired on the spot, and another nine were fired after receiving notices of proposed removal, including Yackulic, according to the American Federation of Government Employees Council 238, the EPA’s largest union.
On Wednesday, Yackulic and five other former employees filed legal challenges to their firings with the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board. They argue their firings are illegal retaliation for perceived political affiliation.
These are people who exercised their First Amendment right by raising an issue of public concern outside of their official capacities, said Joanna Citron Day, one of the attorneys representing the fired EPA employees and general counsel for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.
When asked for comment about Yackulic’s challenge, an EPA spokesperson wrote Wednesday evening, “As a matter of longstanding practice, EPA does not comment on current or pending litigation.”
The former employees also argue their firings were arbitrarily harsh and inconsistent punishment for their actions compared to other signatories of the letter and that they were fired without cause.
Yackulic said he witnessed the ebb and flow of presidential administrations’ contrasting priorities. He said he’d always been able to work within those boundaries and keep the pace of what he’s working on.
Yackulic said that at the time of signing the letter, the administrator had announced intentions to change the direction of the agency.
The EPA has fundamentally changed this year by rolling back cornerstone environmental policies that protect clean water and air.
It has proposed to remove federal protections for millions of acres of wetlands and streams. It plans to stop acknowledging that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health. And the administration continues to roll back limits on toxic chemicals in drinking water, among other human health protections.
Earth saw its warmest year on record in 2024. Climate change is fueling drought, record deadly heat, more wildfire and longer fire seasons in the Pacific Northwest.
Rising ocean temperatures fueled by human-caused climate change have intensified hurricanes in the Atlantic, low-oxygen conditions off the Pacific Northwest coast are becoming more frequent and ocean acidification threatens the food web, fisheries and the people who depend on them.
A long career
Yackulic was born in Colville, Stevens County, grew up in Bellevue and never strayed far from the Northwest.
Scrambling along Index Town Wall and hiking across the Enchantments, a young Yackulic developed a reverence for the wild, and an appreciation for a green world.
He attended Seattle University and law school in California and met his wife Corrie while studying for the bar exam at the University of Washington. He hoped to leave the world he had experienced as a child in at least as good of shape as it was for generations to come.
After law school, Yackulic began to see glaciers recede and other signs of a changing climate.
On his first day at the EPA in 1989, he was assigned to work on the Bunker Hill Mining and Metallurgical Complex Superfund Site. After decades of smelter emissions and dumping mine waste into rivers and streams, the area in Idaho’s panhandle was one of the largest and most complex cleanups in the nation.
Many children in the community at the time had high blood lead levels, an epidemic.
Over time, the result of work by the Coeur d’Alene Tribe, state of Idaho, local public health officials, Yackulic and his colleagues at the EPA to address the heavy metal contamination was tangible.
Diagrams showed steep declines in blood lead levels in tandem with cleanup efforts: when the smelter stopped emitting, when contaminated soil was removed from residents’ yards and the site itself. Fish and wildlife began to recover.
Over the decades, he worked with King County and the city of Seattle to ensure their sewage management was compliant with the Clean Water Act, worked alongside tribal nations to recognize their authority to implement federal environmental laws within their lands, and advanced Superfund cleanups through orders and negotiating settlements.
Simply put, his role over the years was to ensure the fundamental principle of the nation’s Superfund law: The polluter pays for the cleanup.
Now 68, Yackulic hadn’t tied his retirement to a specific age, or an amount hitting his savings, but rather to seeing some of his cases through.
In particular, he wanted to see a consent decree entered on the lower Duwamish and then, he said, stick around for maybe a few more construction seasons to see how the work progresses.
Last year, he drafted an order so Boeing, the city of Seattle and King County could begin in-water cleanup on the lower Duwamish before a court-approved settlement was reached. He and his colleague Nick Vidargas didn’t want to see the pace of the cleanup slowed down.
Yackulic had begun mentoring another attorney who would take over the Quendall site along Lake Washington.
It was another site he had hoped to see through, but both he and the probationary attorney he was working with were fired for signing the letter.
‘Stand up for science’
EPA Administrator Zeldin promised weeks into his tenure to drive “a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.”
The Trump administration in February began firing probationary employees across the federal government.
Zeldin would order the closure of the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights and cut millions of dollars destined for communities bearing the brunt of the impacts polluting industries and climate change.
Yackulic would open his federal inbox and find regular newsblasts from Zeldin, a newsletter dubbed “Call it a Comeback.”
In March, the newsletter announced “the greatest day of deregulation in American history,” including reconsidering the Endangerment Finding, which provided a legal basis for regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, and plans to limit the jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act.
An early June newsblast highlighted proposals to protect “Beautiful, Clean Coal.”
Others celebrated efforts to slash EPA jobs and block policies to encourage the use of electric vehicles.
Yackulic continued with his work.
When he became aware of the EPA employees’ public letter, organized by the “Stand Up for Science” activists, he saw many of his colleagues had already signed on. It was an opportunity to ask the agency to reaffirm its commitment to its mandate, so he signed.
On July 3 he was asked to leave. He spent a few hours collecting the decades of work at his desk and left the office.
“It was heartbreaking. I was shocked,” he said. “I worked with incredible people, and we did good work.”
Concerns foreshadowed in the letter were becoming a reality, Yackulic said.
Just before Labor Day, he would receive a notice of proposed removal on a charge of “Conduct Unbecoming a Federal Employee,” because he had admitted to signing the “Declaration of Dissent.”
In response, Yackulic wrote that signing the letter “is protected First Amendment speech under applicable caselaw,” but was fired Oct. 4.
Decisions about the firings can be appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.