The internal watchdogs for President Donald Trump’s environmental agencies are seeing a significant increase in complaints and reports — particularly regarding alleged retaliation against whistleblowers.
The Department of Energy’s inspector general opened nine times as many whistleblower-retaliation cases in the first year of Trump’s second term than it did in the last year of Joe Biden’s administration, according to a NOTUS review of the inspectors general semiannual reports to Congress.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s inspector general referred roughly six times as many complaints to the office responsible for whistleblower retaliation for review.
The EPA referred 58 hotline calls related to whistleblower retaliation to the inspector general’s office in the 2025 fiscal year, compared to 9 total hotline calls referred in the 2024 fiscal year. At DOE, the inspector general’s office opened a total of 45 investigations into allegations of whistleblower retaliation in the 2025 fiscal year, compared to 5 investigations opened the previous fiscal year.
The EPA, DOE and the Department of the Interior also reported increased activity on their hotlines, where internal employees or people externally can call in and submit reports to watchdogs.
Interior did not provide a breakdown of whistleblower-retaliation statistics in any of its reports.
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