Donald
Trump and Jair Bolsonaro ‘Meltdown’ ice sculptures in New York City. The
sculptures were created to expose their absence at the UN summit on 30
September.
Trump's environment agency seems to be at war
with the environment, say ex-officials
Environment
Trump has brought public health and environment
rollbacks at an EPA already in trouble – and staffers worry it isn’t equipped
to keep Americans safe
Emily
Holden in Washington
Fri 30 Oct
2020 06.20 GMTLast modified on Fri 30 Oct 2020 14.16 GMT
Donald
Trump’s environment agency “actually seems to have a war on the environment”,
has been “utterly untenable”, and has brought about “deeply, deeply troubling
times”, according to three administrators appointed under past presidents.
Reflecting
on Trump’s dozens of attacks on core environmental protections, a fourth put it
another way: “[I’m] really god damned pissed off – and that’s being kind.”
The former
environment administrators, two Republicans and two Democrats, shared their
frustrations on a Joe Biden campaign call and in a separate conversation with
reporters within the last several weeks. They are: Bill Reilly, from the George
HW Bush administration; Christine Todd Whitman, from the George W Bush
administration; Carol Browner, from the Bill Clinton administration, and Gina
McCarthy, from the Barack Obama administration.
They have
more than enough evidence to cite – Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) has reversed rules meant to clean up the air, defend waterways from
industrial pollution and fight climate change.
Trump has
brought the agency to an all-time low, his critics argue. According to a report
from the Environmental Protection Network of more than 500 former agency
officials, the rollbacks have had “serious and measurable consequences,
especially for already overburdened low-income communities and communities of
color”.
The impacts
will include “more respiratory illness and heart disease” that shortens lives;
“decreased water quality” for drinking water, fisheries and recreation;
“reduced Superfund cleanups,”; and “devastating consequences” from unchecked
climate change, the group said.
But EPA’s
problems started long before Trump was elected in 2016.
Fifty years
after its creation under the Nixon administration, the EPA has found itself
outgunned by industry. The agency’s budget and staffing have withered over the
past generation – while industry has tightened its grip on the political system
and entrenched new sectors with minimal oversight.
Amid a
scientific revolution in understanding human and environmental responses to
pollution, regulators have been unable to translate many of those findings into
stronger safeguards.
Those
concerns are detailed by 76 current and former EPA staffers interviewed over
the past several years, in research under peer review. Trump has “accelerated a
longer-term decline in EPA resources, expertise, and authority”, according to
the findings by researchers with the Environmental Data & Governance
Initiative.
As one EPA
staffer explained: “People noticed that the environment was a mess in the 70s
and we needed to clean it. Well, we’ve cleaned it … The air is generally safe …
and we don’t have the blood lead level problems that we used to have.
“It’s not
well appreciated how much work it takes to maintain that.”
In response
to questions about the agency’s record under Trump, spokesman James Hewitt
criticized former EPA administrators for their handling of air pollution around
Ground Zero after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and of the Flint drinking water
crisis.
Hewitt said
air quality had improved 7% under Trump, although an Associated Press report
found air quality improvements are stagnating after years of progress.
He said the
Trump administration delisted as many toxic Superfund sites in four years as
Obama did in eight years, but Huffington Post reported that the number of
priority sites is up and the number of unfunded sites has ballooned.
The
spokesman added the EPA was close to updating a rule for lead and copper that hasn’t
been revised in 30 years, but critics say the changes won’t go far enough.
The numbers
demonstrate EPA has become hamstrung:
The agency
has 14,172 employees, about one for every 23,161 US residents, according to a
separate report by EDGI.
In comparison,
the transportation department has almost four times as many employees, and the
agriculture department has roughly six times as many employees as EPA,
according to the Office of Personnel Management, which uses slightly different
numbers.
EPA
staffing peaked in 1999 and fell 21.7% by 2019, to about the same number of
staffers as under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.
The
agency’s budget has not fared much better. In 1999, it was $7.6bn. Adjusting
only for inflation, it should be $11.7bn today. But it is not, it is $9.1bn.
Many staff
interviewed in the research blamed the politicization of the environment. Over
the past few decades, Republicans have become more aligned with polluting
industries and opposed to regulation, calling it government interference in the
free market.
The most
dividing issue is climate change. While polls show an overwhelming majority of
Americans support environmental protections, they also find that Republicans
are far less likely than Democrats to be worried about how humans are forcing
temperatures higher and causing more extreme weather.
“This
agency is in the process of giving up on protecting people. It’s much more
interested, at least the leadership is, in protecting the regulated community,”
said Christopher Sellers, the lead researcher and a professor of environmental
history at Stonybrook University.
“I would
not trust this agency.”
Sellers’
conclusion is supported by another analysis by researchers in the American
Journal of Public Health, which in 2018 warned the agency was on the edge of
“regulatory capture”. Journalists have consistently reported that top Trump
officials have done exactly what corporations have asked for, while refusing to
meet with environmental advocates.
For
example, a coal executive who fundraised for Trump saw his plan carried out
almost to the letter. A trucking company donated $225,000 to a congressional
candidate and got signoff for its super-polluting big rigs. After heavy
lobbying, EPA scaled back how it determines the risks of dangerous chemicals.
Trump’s EPA
did not respond to inquiries about research and reporting showing the heavy
influence of industry but did provide a list of environmental groups it said it
met with over the last year. Some of those groups told the Guardian their
interactions with EPA were severely limited compared with previous
administrations.
Perhaps the
EPA’s weakest point has been in protecting the most vulnerable Americans –
those who live near polluting facilities and are often low-income and people of
color. The agency has no formal way of measuring all the impacts of living near
multiple threats. For example, it does not know what happens to a person who
breathes dirty air from a highway and a power plant and also drinks
contaminated water.
“Most
environmental statutes … focus sort of point source by point source, facility
by facility, and fail to look at the cumulative impacts,” much less the race or
incomes of those who bear these impacts, said one staffer interviewed.
Six former
EPA administrators joined other former officials in August in an open letter
calling to “reset the course” at the agency.
In a
project from the Environmental Protection Network, they have recommended
changes for curbing vehicle pollution, safeguarding water, relying more on
science and elevating environmental justice.
Stan
Meiburg, who was deputy regional administrator of EPA’s Atlanta office, said
states also do not have the necessary resources to protect people.
“When there
is a crisis, state and local agencies and EPA can respond. But what I worry
about more is can they anticipate things to prevent problems from happening,
rather than just waiting until a disaster strikes,” Meiburg said.
“When you
think about the post-Trump EPA, the issue is not just to rebuild what was, but
to do something to meet the challenges of the future.”
This
article was amended on 30 October 2020 after an editing error interchanged the
administrations in which Christine Todd Whitman and Carol Browner worked.
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