As President Donald Trump threatens deep cuts to the federal workforce and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, a four-decade effort to restore the ailing health of the Chesapeake Bay could be back in his crosshairs.

A memo circulated Wednesday by Trump’s Office of Management and Budget directed agencies to develop plans for layoffs of career employees. As an example, the president said during his first cabinet meeting, his administration is planning a 65% cut to staff at the EPA. Within hours, officials corrected that these cuts would apply to the agency’s budget, not its workforce.

But either would amount to a drastic reduction in the EPA’s work, and the announcement has conservation workers and Chesapeake Bay advocates bracing for major curtailments.

The recently circumspect Chesapeake Bay Foundation warned in a statement Thursday that Trump’s moves could “spell disaster” and create “an existential crisis” for the decades-old cleanup effort.

“Taking a wrecking ball to federal agencies and grants not only cripples progress,” Chesapeake Bay Foundation President Hilary Harp Falk said, “it will leave future generations with air choked by emissions, fouled beaches where it’s unsafe to swim, and empty tables at crab feasts.”

So far, the Trump administration has not specified where it intends to cut funding within the EPA’s roughly $9 billion budget. If Administrator Lee Zeldin really moved forward with a 65% cut to the EPA workforce, it would reduce the agency’s employment from around 15,000 to a level not seen since its founding under President Richard Nixon.

An EPA spokesperson did not respond Friday to a request for comment.

The elimination of support for bay restoration work would violate the Clean Water Act, Falk said, which requires the federal government to coordinate a multistate response to the cleanup.

If Trump does turn his sights on the Chesapeake, it wouldn’t come as a surprise.

The president proposed slashing funding for the EPA’s Chesapeake Bay Program — the federally organized initiative that unites research and cleanup across the bay watershed — every year of his previous term, but Congress never approved his recommended cuts.

Rachel Felver, spokesperson for the Chesapeake Bay Program, said work there continues as normal. Still, she added, the initiative lost five staffers this month to federal workforce cuts in the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Forest Service.

The Chesapeake Bay Program received $92 million in the most recent federal budget, all of it through the EPA. More than two-thirds of that funding goes to state and local governments and other partner organizations to help meet pollution goals, while the remainder funds the Bay Program office in Annapolis.

Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has moved aggressively to cut federal spending, deploying the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, to oversee the ouster of thousands of employees. On Thursday, the administration began firing hundreds of staff at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which leads the government’s climate science efforts.

Falk said the Chesapeake restoration effort already has lost valuable expertise to workforce cuts across the U.S. Department of Agriculture, NOAA and the EPA. At the same, continued uncertainty around Trump’s freeze on trillions of dollars in federal spending has halted projects around the watershed, she said.

One affected organization is the nonprofit Chesapeake Bay Trust.

Trust President Jana Davis said the freeze on many of its federal grants has thawed, allowing it to draw money again, but the nonprofit remains unclear on what could happen to this funding in the coming months. One of the nonprofit’s USDA accounts, which funds tree plantings in urban and low-income communities, remains frozen with unpaid invoices of $250,000.

About a third of the grant funding the Bay Trust distributes, around $10 million, comes from the federal government, Davis said, meaning those programs are all vulnerable to Trump cuts.

Aside from tree plantings, those federally funded grants support green infrastructure projects like rain gardens that reduce flooding and science-focused field trips for K-12 students.

Advocates acknowledged that, over four decades of cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay, progress has been slow. The restoration effort missed a much-anticipated deadline to achieve a long list of pollution goals by 2025, and states and environmental officials are in the process or recalibrating their targets.

Still, advocates point to signs of headway: The bay achieved its highest environmental grade in more than 20 years on the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science’s 2023-2024 report card — a C+.

Davis said that for some, the possibility of wholesale cuts to federal environmental work brings back memories of 1970s-era pollution in American waterways. The Chesapeake region has seen big strides since then, so much so that residents are beginning to swim in the Baltimore harbor.

“It’s because of all this hard work,” Davis said. “The idea of going backward, it’s unsettling.”

Matt Pluta, the Choptank riverkeeper for the Eastern Shore conservation group ShoreRivers, said that while proposed cuts are just talk for now, his organization is preparing for a smaller budget.

ShoreRivers receives around a quarter of its funding — about $2 million — through various federal agencies, money that supports work like addressing forever chemical contamination, helping farmers and towns mitigate floods, and developing emergency management plans for flooding.

“It’s restoration and water quality for us, but it’s public health and safety for the community,” Pluta said.

If the EPA does gut its staff, Pluta added, his river-protection work would become “essentially lawless,” rendering enforcement of the Clean Water Act impossible.

The Choose Clean Water Coalition, an Annapolis-based advocacy group representing hundreds of organizations, urged the Trump administration in a statement to sustain environmental efforts in the Chesapeake, calling the work vital to waterways and habitats as well as the local economy.

“Small businesses and communities are suffering from the delay in federal funding that supports clean water projects in the Chesapeake region,” said Kristin Reilly, the coalition’s director. “It’s essential this funding is released so this critical work can move forward.”

Earlier this month, the coalition conducted an anonymous survey of its members and found that 70% of respondents had seen one or more grants paused due to the federal funding freeze.

Though the Trump administration has begun to unfreeze climate and environmental grants, Choose Clean Water has found that many programs administered by the USDA remain paused.

Meanwhile, 35% of organizations said they receive more than half of their funding through federal grants.

Advocates can’t allow the country’s largest estuary to fall victim to “misguided efforts to root out waste,” said Falk, who said protecting thousands of unique species, the health of 18 million people in the Chesapeake watershed and a whole region’s culture isn’t “a waste.”

“Losing decades of progress, undermining science, destroying an effective federal/state partnership, and jeopardizing our future,” she said, “that’s not just a waste, it’s a tragedy.”

Correction: This story has been updated to correct the name of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.