President Trump proposed a 31 percent cut to the Environmental Protection Agency, which, if approved by Congress, would mean thousands of people leaving the agency. But one longtime EPA staffer didn’t wait for the axe to come down. Mustafa Ali, the head of the EPA’s environmental justice program, decided to leave the agency he’d worked for for close to 25 years. And despite his long tenure at the agency, Ali says he didn’t get a chance to speak with either the Trump transition team or the EPA’s new administrator, Scott Pruitt, in the weeks before his departure. “I was not invited into those conversations,” he told VICE News during a sit-down interview on Wednesday. “But there are lots of individuals inside the agency who have some expertise in that field as well. So I'm sure that there were some very, very basic conversations.” This might explain why Ali’s resignation letter to Scott Pruitt was so lengthy; he needed to explain that regulatory rollbacks and proposed cuts to the EPA’s budget would hurt the communities he’d spent years protecting. “What I saw was that there were actions that were happening that I felt were detrimental to communities,” Ali said, sitting in the Hip Hop Caucus’ brand new Washington, DC office. He’s since taken on the job of Senior Vice President of Climate, Environmental Justice & Community Revitalization at the nonprofit organization, which uses hip-hop music and culture to promote political activism among youth and young adults. “You can't make those [budget] cuts and expect that people are going to be in a better place.” Subscribe to VICE News here: http://bit.ly/Subscribe-to-VICE-News Check out VICE News for more: http://vicenews.com/ Follow VICE News here: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vicenews Twitter: https://twitter.com/vicenews Tumblr: http://vicenews.tumblr.com/ Instagram: http://instagram.com/vicenews More videos from the VICE network: https://www.fb.com/vicevideo