Chopping the EPA
The Trump people undermining the science people in the government:
When the city of Toledo temporarily lost access to clean drinking water several years ago after a bloom of toxic algae, the Environmental Protection Agency sent scientists from its Office of Research and Development to study health effects and formulate solutions.
The same office was on the front lines of the Flint water crisis and was a critical presence in handling medical waste from the U.S. Ebola cases in 2014.
Thomas Burke, who directed ORD during the last two years of the Obama administration and was the agency’s science adviser, calls the office the nation’s “scientific backstop in emergencies.”
That seems like something we need, right?
Not to Donnie from Queens it doesn’t. Donnie understands selling shit for more than it’s worth, and nothing else.
President Trump’s 2018 budget would slash ORD’s funding in half as part of an overall goal to cut the EPA’s budget by 31 percent.
A statement from EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt did not directly address the cuts to ORD, but offered broad defense of the proposed agency budget, saying it “respects the American taxpayer” and “supports EPA’s highest priorities with federal funding for priority work in infrastructure, air and water quality, and ensuring the safety of chemicals in the marketplace.”
That’s very sweet and charming but they need the science to underpin all that.
ORD has no regulatory authority, but it conducts the bulk of the research that underlies EPA policies. ORD scientists are involved in “virtually every major environmental challenge the nation has,” Burke said. Diminishing the role and input of the office, he said, risked leaving the country “uninformed about risks and public health.”
Let’s not do that.
Trump’s budget, released Tuesday, reflects the president’s wish list. The numbers likely will change by the time it goes through the congressional appropriations process, but the proposed cuts are consistent with the administration’s push against environmental regulation and scientific funding. Many of the cuts fall on agencies involved with climate change research, including the EPA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy.
Mick Mulvaney, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, told reporters in a Tuesday briefing that the budget reduces climate science funding without eliminating it.
“Do we target it? Sure,” Mulvaney said in response to a reporter’s question. “Do a lot of the EPA reductions aim at reducing the focus on climate science? Yes. Does it mean that we are anti-science? Absolutely not. We’re simply trying to get things back in order to where we can look at the folks who pay the taxes, and say, look, yeah, we want to do some climate science, but we’re not going to do some of the crazy stuff the previous administration did.”
They want to do some climate science, just not too much.
Christine Todd Whitman, a former EPA administrator who worked for George W. Bush from 2001 to June 2003, said the proposed ORD cuts are more drastic than anything she can remember.
Whitman said she expects Congress will restore much of the funding, but she worries about the message behind the budget.
“A budget to me was always a policy document,” she said. Regardless of what Congress does, this administration’s policy “indicates to me [that] they’ll be looking for other ways to … stifle the research and slow it down,” she said.
Because that’s who they are.
Because what you don’t know can’t hurt you, right?
Seriously, though, this is right in line with the desires of the Trump voters I know. They believe the EPA is responsible for higher food prices (never mind that they constitute a much lower percentage of our wages than they did in the past), higher gas prices (never mind that they’re lower now than they were in the past), and just in general “telling us what to do in our own towns”.
The illusions about the power of the EPA are immense, too. Most the people I know (possibly inflated since I live in a red state, but I hear it from a lot of Democrats, too) believe the EPA has essentially absolute power, and can just come in and start shutting down any business they don’t like, and forcing people to pay trillion dollar fines for tiny infractions, like dumping their oil on their driveway or having an antifreeze leak in their car. That’s partially the fault of the media, who always breathlessly announce a multimillion dollar fine assessed by the EPA for something like, say, a major environmental spill, but never bother to put a front page story out there when the fine is reduced down to almost nothing a bit later.
The Obama administration was extremely cautious and conservative in dealing with climate change. He did very little to rock the boat, and even the touted Paris accord is really not particularly stringent when we look closely at what it does – it will not make much difference at this point in the game, but will mostly make us feel good because we think we’re doing something.