Freeze
The Trump administration has instructed officials at the Environmental Protection Agency to freeze its grants and contracts, a move that could affect everything from state-led climate research to localized efforts to improve air and water quality to environmental justice projects aimed at helping poor communities.
An email went out to employees in the agency’s Office of Acquisition Management within hours of President Trump’s swearing-in on Friday.
“New EPA administration has asked that all contract and grant awards be temporarily suspended, effective immediately,” read the email, which was shared with The Washington Post. “Until we receive further clarification, which we hope to have soon, please construe this to include task orders and work assignments.”
In other words all EPA-funded research is stopped.
Myron Ebell, who oversaw the EPA transition for the new administration, told ProPublica on Monday that the freezing of grants and contracts was not unprecedented.
“They’re trying to freeze things to make sure nothing happens they don’t want to have happen, so any regulations going forward, contracts, grants, hires, they want to make sure to look at them first,” said Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an industry-backed group that has long sought to slash the authority of the EPA.
Of course it has. The name of the “institute” says it all – “competitive enterprise” is the enemy of any kind of program or policy or activity that would interfere with “the free market.”
But not in recent history has such a blanket freeze taken place, and one employee told ProPublica he did not recall anything like it in nearly a decade with the agency.
The move is likely to increase anxieties inside an already tense agency. Ebell and other transition officials have made little secret about their goal of greatly reducing the EPA’s footprint and regulatory reach. Trump has repeatedly criticized the EPA for what he calls a string of onerous, expensive regulations that are hampering businesses. And his nominee to run the agency, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, has repeatedly sued the EPA over the years, challenging its legal authority to regulate everything from mercury pollution to various wetlands and waterways to carbon emissions from power plants.
Because obviously we should just destroy everything so that people like Trump can make more and more and more and more money.
Trump has also withdrawn the US from the TPP, a “free trade” agreement which was designed to protect US corporations from national regulation. Definitely an “own goal”. The result is that the other signatories to the agreement are scrambling to renegotiate it, and this is the ominous aspect for the US, include China in the TPP.
That might not seem important compared to Trump’s domestic vandalism, however in the long term, a rogue US will be progressively frozen out of international trade. The man is a dickhead. Hopefully, the managements of those huge transnational corporations which really run the world economy will carefully explain to Trump the dangerous path he is taking. Will he take notice?
Ironically, I’ve been getting “Kill TPP” emails from LeadNow (progressive Canadian org) for a while now. Of course, I expect the things they don’t like about TPP (e.g. ability of multinationals to sue governments over obstruction of business by environmental or labour regulations) are not the same things Trump doesn’t like about it, and re-negotiated TPP would keep the nasty bits.
Still, this may advance the day the PTB find a way to dump Trump (which may be turn out to be a frying pan/fire scenario for the rest of us, but let’s cross that bridge when we get there).
Steve Watson,
It’s not certain that a renegotiated TPP would keep all the ‘nasty bits’ since they were essentially a US initiative and some countries governments thought that they were the price they had to pay to get access to the US market. With America out of the equation and a change of government here in Australia, the result might be different.
With China saying essentially that they wanted to build their own TPP with blackjack and hookers (Futurama, The Series Has Landed) the US is going to be severely hampered in the East and since we can in no way match their manufacturing capacity (and depending on the product, expertise) we are royally screwed.
Anyone with middle class aspirations may as well kick those to the curb at this point.