TRUMP CABINET
Perks, power and putdowns
For 37 mostly female farmworkers in California’s Central Valley, United States policy under Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt became personal not long after sun-up one day in May 2017.
Picking cabbage that morning, the workers noticed a tarry smell drifting from a nearby orchard. Mouths and lips tingled or went numb. Throats went dry. Soon some workers were vomiting and collapsing.
Officials in California’s farmrich Kern County, where the workers fell ill, concluded that the harvesters were reacting to a pesticide, chlorpyrifos, misapplied at the neighbouring orchard.
Five weeks before, in one of his first acts at the EPA, Pruitt had reversed an Obama-era initiative to ban all food crop uses of the pesticide, which damages the brain and nervous system of foetuses and young children, and has been prohibited as a household bugkiller since 2001.
While the new ban would not have gone into effect by the time of the Central Valley incident, Pruitt’s action postponed any further consideration of barring the pesticide on food crops at least until 2022. Chlorpyrifos is crucial to agriculture, and the farms using it needed ‘‘regulatory certainty’’ Pruitt’s EPA said in announcing his March 2017 decision, using a phrase that would become a watchword for his businessfriendly environmental rulings.
In all, the Trump administration has targeted at least 45 environmental rules, including 25 at the EPA, according to a tracker by Harvard Law School’s energy and environment programme. The EPA rule changes would affect regulation of air, water and climate change, and transform how the EPA makes its regulatory decisions.
Pruitt, who resigned on Thursday after months of ethics scandals, announced many of the policy changes quickly, and former EPA officials and environmental groups predict they will be vulnerable to court challenges.
‘‘The world is focusing on Pruitt and his indiscretions, but they’re minuscule when you look at the impact of that change’’ on decision-making, said Chris Zarba, who quit this year as co-ordinator of two of the agency’s science advisory panels.
He was referring to allegations, now the subject of several federal investigations, about Pruitt’s lavish spending on travel and security, including a $43,000 soundproof telephone booth, and claims that he misused his office for personal gain, including seeking a fastfood franchise for his wife.
EPA spokesman Lincoln Ferguson defended the agency’s work under Pruitt, although some achievements he noted were largely completed in previous administrations.
‘‘The science is clear: under President Trump greenhouse gas emissions are down, Superfund sites are being cleaned up at a higher rate than under President Obama, and the federal government is investing more money to improve water infrastructure than ever before,’’ Ferguson said.
Among Pruitt’s actions and proposals are:
Climate change
Donald Trump, who famously called manmade climate-change an ‘‘expensive hoax’’ before his election, declared last year that the US would pull out of the Paris global accord on cutting climate-changing emissions from coal plants and other sources. Pruitt, for his part, said he doesn’t believe humans are one of the main causes of climate changes.
In October he formally proposed the repeal of an Obama-era rule targeting emissions from electricity plants powered by coal and other fossil fuels. ‘‘The war against coal is over,’’ he told Kentucky coalminers.
The Obama rule would have cut power plant emissions by one-third. The Obama administration projected that it would prevent up to 6600 premature deaths a year from air pollution.
Clean air
Pruitt’s other proposals affecting clean air include allowing truck-builders to retrofit new tractor-trailer bodies with old diesel engines built before tougher pollution standards.
He called the Obama administration’s ban on the dirtier truck engines an example of regulatory overreach that ‘‘threatened to put an entire industry of specialised truck manufacturers out of business’’.
Though just a tiny niche in overall truck sales, the Obama administration said the retrofitted trucks would account for up to 1600 early deaths each year from the soot alone.
Clean water
Pruitt suspended an Obama-era version of a rule that ultimately governs what farmers, ranchers and businesses must do to protect water flowing through their property on its way to lakes, oceans and bays. The socalled Waters of the United States rule has an impact on the water supply for people and wildlife. Pruitt, who had not made public his rewritten version of the rule when he resigned, told Nebraska farmers that his version would provide clarity and regulatory reform. ‘‘That’s how you save the economy $1 billion,’’ he added. Americans are already living with results of slowdowns and rollbacks in environmental rules, says Elizabeth Southerland, who resigned last year as director of science and technology at the EPA’s Office of Water. ‘‘Everybody is now exposed to ongoing pollution, future environmental crises, because so many of these are being repealed.’’
Science
Pruitt boosted industrial and business representation on panels that advise the EPA. Other changes called for more consideration of the costs of environmental rules. And a major Pruitt change would allow EPA decision-makers to consider only studies for which all the underlying data is available.
Supporters say those changes are broadening the EPA’s decision-making and making it more transparent.
Opponents say they could throw out the kind of decadeslong public-health studies, using confidential patient information, that drove landmark regulation of air pollutants and other threats.
Pesticides
Pruitt also paused or slowed action on some other regulations started but not completed under Obama, as with chlorpyrifos.
Chlorpyrifos used as directed offers ‘‘wide margins of protection for human health and safety’’, says Gregg Schmidt, spokesman for its maker, DowDupont.
Industries say Pruitt’s EPA was giving business and economic impacts the consideration and input that past administrations long denied them.
‘‘This is about how you find the appropriate balance here, where we can continue to make
significant progress in environmental and health protection while continuing to benefit the economy,’’ says Mike Walls, vice-president of regulatory and technical affairs at the American Chemistry Council trade group.
‘‘The fact that industry no longer has an adversary in its government, and specifically at the EPA, is a huge step forward in common sense regulation,’’ says Ashley Burke of the National Mining Association.
A retreat
Pruitt had put on hold the Obama-era attempt to ban consumer sales of paint strippers containing methylene chloride. But he reversed course in May after meeting families of men who died after using paint stripper.
Brian Wynne, brother of 31-year-old Drew, is grateful. But if Pruitt’s EPA had never stayed the rule in the first place, Brian believes, methylene chloride may already have been out of stores by autumn 2017, when his brother went to a South Carolina home-goods store to buy paint stripper to use on the floor of his cold-brew coffee company.
Drew Wynne was found dead at the business last October, killed by methylene chloride, according to coroners.