EPA says crackdowns on polluters dropped in 2018
Civil and criminal crackdowns on polluters dropped sharply in the second year of the Trump administration, according to 2018 enforcement figures released Friday by the Environmental Protection Agency.
The Trump administration EPA said the agency is taking a new tack with polluters, giving states more of a role in regulation and enforcement.
“In fiscal year 2018, we continued our focus on expediting site cleanup, deterring noncompliance, and returning facilities to compliance with the law,” said Susan Bodine, acting head of EPA enforcement.
Declines include civil investigations carried out by the agency, which fell to 22 last year, down from 40 in 2017 and 125 in 2016, the last year of the Obama administration.
Federal environmental regulators opened 129 criminal cases in 2018. That was down from 170 under the last year of the Obama administration, although up from 115 criminal cases opened the first year under Trump.
WASHINGTON — A new report from the White House suggests changes to the Affordable Care Act under President Donald Trump do not fundamentally undermine the health law.
The Council of Economic Advisers report, released Friday, says Obamaera subsidies that help low- and middle-income customers pay their premiums will help keep HealthCare.gov afloat even if some healthy people drop out or seek other coverage because of Trump’s changes. Nearly 90 percent of customers get taxpayer-provided assistance.
The council is a White House agency that advises the president.
Larry Levitt, of the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, said it suggests to him the administration is trying to move on from the battle over the ACA, which Trump and Republicans in Congress failed to repeal.
The report looks at three big changes under Trump that affect former President Barack Obama’s health care law.
They are congressional repeal of the law’s unpopular fines on people who go uninsured, “association health plans” for small businesses and low-cost, short-term health insurance that doesn’t have to cover basic benefits like prescription drugs.
“These reforms do not ‘sabotage’ the ACA but rather provide a more efficient focus of tax-funded care to those in need,” says the report, casting the administration’s changes as “de-regulation.”
About 10 million people continue to get private insurance through the ACA’S subsidized markets, or exchanges, and another 12 million are covered by its Medicaid expansion.