BRINGING HOME THE TRUMP ENVIRONMENTAL CUTS
President Donald Trump’s proposed 2018 budget defies reason — especially his draconian cuts to all things environmental, educational, scientific and humanitarian.
Take his proposed 31 percent slash to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, for example. The agency, formed by Richard Nixon in 1970, faces its smallest budget — $5.7 billion — since it came into being, according to a New York Times analysis.
The logic can’t be, as Trump says, because our regulations are “a disaster.”
Take Chattanooga’s air clean up, for instance. With EPA direction, we turned the nation’s dirtiest-air city into a comeback kid and outdoor mecca that now has a growing manufacturing base, a growing population and a growing per capita income.
But EPA’s air clean-up hasn’t been successful only in Chattanooga. Since 1980 the index for six major pollutants, carbon monoxide, ozone, particulates, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and lead has dropped by 65 percent. And in the meantime, the national economy grew more than 150 percent, vehicle miles increased by more 100 percent, the population grew by more than 40 percent and energy consumption rose by 25 percent.
Nor can the Trump administration’s logic be that public opinion demands less environmental regulation: A 2016 Gallup poll found that 43 percent of Americans say that they worry about air pollution a great deal, and a whopping 61 percent said they worry about polluted drinking water. Likewise, 56 percent said they worry a great deal about pollution of rivers, lakes and reservoirs.
Yet EPA, faced with this administration’s financial plan, will have to cut 3,200 jobs and eliminate the agency’s efforts to fight climate change, eliminate the Clean Power Plan to reduce CO2 emissions from power plants, eliminate restoration programs for the Great Lakes and Chesapeake Bay, eliminate the Energy Star program for efficient appliances and slash by a third the Superfund program that cleans up contaminated sites.
Like politics, all environment is local. EPA’s Superfund program helped clean up toxic Chattanooga Creek, Amnicola Dump, lead-filled yards in Chattanooga’s Southside and countless other contaminated sites around this region. A spinoff of the Superfund program provided the oversight and engineering know-how to clean up TVA’s massive Kingston ash spill that polluted the Emory, Clinch and Tennessee rivers.
When Chattanooga’s century-old combined sewer and storm drains consistently dumped raw sewage into the Tennessee River with every heavy rain, EPA forced a fix, but also helped the city divert a large portion of money we normally would have paid as a fine to the U.S. Treasury to use instead to construct part of the fix.
And when our crisp, clean air helped us land Volkswagen’s only U.S. auto assembly plant to employ thousands here, we were dismayed and downright terrified that the reverberations of VW’s diesel emissions scandal might disrupt our economy. EPA and the Department of Justice, however, asked VW to produce electric vehicles in our Chattanooga plant as part of their restitution. The German newspaper Welt am Sonntag also reported that EPA was in talks with Volkswagen to pressure the automaker to help build or expand a network of charging stations for electric vehicles in the United States.
Let’s just cross our fingers and hope Trump administration bumbling doesn’t scorch this plan. After all, Mr. Art of the Deal already has said he was ordering the EPA to review — with an eye for rollback — the nation’s fuel efficiency standards aimed at reducing greenhouse gases.
In all, Trump’s budget would result in a nearly $60 billion increase in defense, security and veterans spending (including a 1.4 billion increase for the National Nuclear Security Administration), while eliminating or gutting a wide array of programs aimed at protecting the environment and helping the working poor and unemployed.
We’ll spend more than twice or three times EPA’s proposed budget on “the wall” that Trump and a handful of isolationists want, while slashing the budget for State Department peacemakers by 29 percent, the Agriculture and Labor departments by 21 percent, the Justice Department by 20 percent, the Education Department by 14 percent. The list goes on and on.
In a news conference in mid-March, Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney scoffed at the notion that the cuts were “hardhearted. He said Meals on Wheels that feeds elderly people was “just not showing results,” and he posited that there’s “no demonstrable evidence” that after-school programs for hungry kids help them do better in school.
Mulvaney dismissed humanitarian concerns of famine and starvation facing 20 million people overseas: “We’re absolutely reducing funding to the UN and to the various foreign aid programs. That should come as a surprise to no one who watched the campaign.”
Actually what comes as no surprise is that this White House is the one and only “basket of deplorables.”