Several employees in the Environmental Protection Agency spent their Earth Day learning that they needed to find new jobs.

Hundreds of staffers in the department’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights were laid off as part of a reduction in force Tuesday, as were employees working on environmental justice and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in regional offices.

In February, environmental justice staffers were placed on administrative leave and some of the agency’s probationary workers were fired. Now, 280 workers involved with environmental justice and diversity, equity and inclusion will be terminated, with 175 other EPA workers being assigned to new jobs. It’s all part of EPA chief Lee Zeldin’s pledge to drive “a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion.” According to an EPA memo obtained by NBC News, the reduction in force will take effect on July 31.

The EPA under Trump is ditching its mission of actually protecting the environment. The department rolled back environmental regulations last month along with parts of the Clean Air Act. In addition to the rollbacks and cuts, the agency also tried to cut grants to nonprofit organizations in an attack on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, set up by President Biden with the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. A federal judge temporarily nixed those plans last month.

The regulatory changes that Zeldin is pushing with Trump’s blessing will harm countless Americans, including Trump’s supporters. “It’s practically inevitable” that more people will get sick from reduced regulation and the loss of funding, one EPA staffer anonymously told TNR earlier this month.

It’s fitting that Tuesday’s layoff announcement fell on Earth Day because the Trump administration has shown that it cares little, if anything, about the earth. The new energy secretary, fracking executive Chris Wright, last month described climate change as the “side effect of building the modern world.”

The FBI has moved to criminalize groups like Habitat for Humanity for receiving grants from the EPA under the Biden administration, and Trump himself has claimed that climate change will provide more seafront property and is therefore better for real estate. The White House is celebrating Earth Day by making the planet worse.

Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, has begun baselessly claiming that birthright citizenship has become a massive welfare scam.

During an appearance on Newsmax Monday evening, Miller ranted about Donald Trump’s executive order to upend birthright citizenship, which the Supreme Court will weigh next month.

“Birthright citizenship is the biggest, costliest scam in financial history,” Miller ranted. “An illegal alien could come here nine months pregnant, or on a tourist visa nine months pregnant, have a baby. That baby is then declared an automatic citizen, which then entitles the entire family to come here and live here, and every one of them get welfare … unlimited welfare, applying as the custodian of this citizen—so-called—child.”

“The biggest financial rip-off of Americans in history, not to mention the fact that it is the number one magnet for illegal immigration and invasion,” Miller continued.

With his penchant for white nationalism, Miller is no stranger to making disgusting, racist generalizations about immigrants. Miller has previously endorsed a theory called “remigration” that, unlike deportation, refers to the forcible removal of non–ethnically European immigrants and their families, regardless of their actual citizenship.

In a particularly outrageous escalation, Miller also claimed, without providing evidence, that birthright citizenship was a “major national security threat” that had been “used by foreign governments to conduct espionage against the United States.”

Halfway through his outrageous claim Monday, he switched to a hypothetical. “Because now, you see we can keep out a foreign spy who has a visa, who’s trying to get permission to board an airplane—but what happens when a foreign government uses this ridiculous birthright scam in order to create automatic citizens to then grow up as assets of a foreign government?” he demanded.

Birthright citizenship was established in the Fourteenth Amendment: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Congress and the states ratified the amendment in 1869 to overturn the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dred Scott v. Sanford, which had held that people of African descent can never acquire American citizenship, and to provide a constitutional backstop for Black civil rights in the South during Reconstruction. Miller argued that the use of the birthright citizenship clause had strayed too far from its intended........

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