A budget that’s bad for people who breathe
President Trump has released his fiscal year 2018 budget, and it should concern anyone who breathes air or drinks water. While it targets all of the federal agencies that address environmental quality and climate change, it saves its most vicious cuts for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The president proposes to strip nearly one-third of the agency’s budget and more than one-quarter of its full-time staff at the same time that his administration seeks to boost our country’s dirtiest industries and reduce access to health care for those who live in communities that are hit hardest by pollution.
As someone who has worked to protect New Mexico’s environment for more than 30 years — and as a person who breathes air and drinks water — it concerns me deeply.
The federal administration’s rationale? That this budget “eliminates duplication of enforcement actions carried out by the States ... . ” In addition to being completely disingenuous, those are worrisome words for people who live in a place where the state government has been working to undo environmental protections for nearly seven years. Where Susana Martinez launched her tenure by purging experienced, thoughtful regulators and slashing budgets. Where decision-makers asked industry for a deregulation wish list and then set about to make it happen. Where the administration has championed rules that allow pollution of water in oil/gas fields and mining districts, and which now is working to weaken state-level water protections. Sound familiar?
It’s frightening because of the impacts that these decisions have on our resources, our health and our quality of life. Where water is concerned, just ask anyone who lives near Homestake Mining’s radioactive mill in Milan, adjacent to Dairy Row near Las Cruces, or in Albuquerque, where drinking water is threatened by a plume of toxic jet fuel from Kirtland AFB. These multi-generational, multi-billion-dollar problems resulted from a lack of rules and oversight, for which we will pay for generations. Yet our decision-makers continue to duck these realities and the lessons they teach.
The same is true for air pollution. For decades, it’s been linked to asthma, cancer and cardiopulmonary disease. New research links it to dementia, learning disabilities and autism, and DNA damage in children. If (or when) the EPA takes aim at certain air quality rules, New Mexico will have no choice but to follow suit as some of our air quality standards can be “no more stringent than” federal standards.
So, in New Mexico, we have a double whammy: underfunded environmental agencies with anti-science, anti-public, anti-regulation agendas at both the state and federal levels. What is a New Mexican to do? Fortunately, there are still places to turn.
If you face an environmental threat, first talk to your neighbors. Second, contact your local decisionmakers. Many solutions to environmental problems are political, and if your city councilor/county commissioners/state rep and senator hear from enough constituents, you could have powerful allies in protecting your community — see the Santa Fe Oil and Gas Ordinance and the La Bajada mine as recent examples.
What if that doesn’t work? Today, there seem to be plenty of politicians willing to turn their backs on their constituents for the sake of industry and deregulation. But we can keep the pressure on them — there are more of us than them. And we can support those groups in New Mexico that are willing to take industries and agencies to court to force them to do the right thing.
I urge Congress to throw this budget back at the president and clamor for a budget that will protect science, protect the environment and protect the people of the United States.