Great Lakes funding in jeopardy with Trump’s plans
Trump government could cut EPA budget for region from $300M to $10M
Astonishment and deep concern are how scientists and politicians on both sides of the border are reacting to news U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration wants to nearly eliminate federal funding for the main program aimed at monitoring, cleaning up and protecting the Great Lakes.
“Most of us are in shock — it’s stunning,” said Dan Heath, director of the Great Lakes Institute of Environmental Research at the University of Windsor.
“The health of the Great Lakes is a critical issue to a large portion of the economy and the people of the Great Lakes region,” he said.
Heath and others describe the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as the dominant partner in many initiatives designed to maintain and improve the health of the world’s largest freshwater system.
A number of American media outlets have reported on how Trump’s goal is to carve out a quarter of the EPA’s budget and slash its workforce by almost 3,000 positions. But the National Association of Clean Air Agencies obtained a copy of the actual plan that identifies dozens of programs targeted for deep cuts or elimination, all with the aim of finding $2 billion in annual savings at the agency.
One of those programs, the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, which funds a broad range of efforts — from combating toxic algae blooms and voracious invasive species like Asian carp to air and water pollutants — would see its annual spending of US$300 million slashed to US$10 million.
“It would be disastrous if the proposals became law — we’re very concerned,” said Tim Eder, executive director of Ann Arbor, Mich.based Great Lakes Commission.
The EPA, he said, funds the “first line of defence” in keeping the aggressive Asian carp from invading and taking over the Great Lakes. It is also instrumental in efforts to remediate dozens of environmental “areas of concern” across the basin, including a number of pollution hot spots along Canada’s border, like the Detroit and St. Clair rivers.
“A tremendous amount of progress has been achieved over the past five years under the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, and that would be lost with these cuts, with so much more work left to be done,” Niagara Falls, N.Y. Mayor Paul Dyster said in a letter issued Friday by the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative, a coalition of mayors from more than 125 cities across the basin, including Windsor. “It would be a tragedy for the U.S. government to step back from its commitment.”
Trump has attacked the EPA in the past as a job killer. It’s the Congress, and not the president, who sets budgets in the U.S., but both the executive and legislative branches of government are now Republican controlled, and there appears to be widespread party support for Trump’s plans to slash regulations to boost job creation and slash spending to boost military expenditures.
“We will work hard with our partners in Congress to make sure these cuts don’t happen,” said Eder, adding there has been strong bipartisan support in Congress for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative launched in 2011.
University of Windsor biologist Jan Ciborowski is one of the principal investigators in one of the biggest EPA-funded Great Lakes remediation initiatives, aimed at studying the condition and health of Great Lakes wetlands.
“We are very, very fortunate to have this program,” he said, adding any loss of EPA funding could mean the loss of hundreds of graduate student research jobs created to conduct long-range reporting on changing conditions for the Great Lakes wetlands.
“Drastic cuts like that would have a definite impact,” said Sally Cole-Misch, spokeswoman for the International Joint Commission’s Great Lakes regional office based in Windsor. “We certainly hope residents in the basin would fight this,” she added.
Ciborowski said the EPA is “a major employer of scientists, who are the doctors of the environment,” while GLIER director Heath calls the agency “the big player in the Great Lakes.”
The health of the Great Lakes is a critical issue to a large portion of the economy and the people of the Great Lakes region.