5 hidden risks seen in slashing the EPA
Bloomberg News
NEW YORK — President Donald Trump pledged during the 2016 campaign he would only “leave a little bit” of federal rules that protect human health and the environment. Now, about 50 former officials of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency are firing back in a lengthy analysis that details, program by program, what amounts to a starvation diet for the EPA.
Calling themselves the Environmental Protection Network, they worked through both Republican and Democratic administrations. The group’s members are putting aside their differences over policies and programs to stop what they say “appears to be nothing less than a full-throttle attack on the principle underlying all U.S. environmental laws — that protecting the health and environment of all Americans is a national priority.”
Even before formally registering as a nonprofit organization, the network has put together a 50-page analysis of the president’s proposed EPA budget, based partly on the White House’s fiscal 2018 budget blueprint. The blueprint, released March 16, sketched out topline cuts of 31 percent of the agency’s budget and 21 percent of its staff. The new administration’s targeting of the agency requires an independent, expert assessment of what’s happening there, the group says.
The analysis is also based on an earlier, confidential budget document called a passback, which makes program-by-program funding estimates.
Below the EPA’s largescale missions is a constellation of little-known programs that have become a part of the EPA’s approach to health and environmental protection.
Here are five changes the network’s analysis says Mr. Trump has proposed and the risks they were created to curb. The number of EPA programs targeted for elimination is more than 10 times as long as this list.
Endocrine disruptors
The EPA Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention runs a program that screens and tests endocrine disruptors, chemicals that can harm reproductive health and child growth and development. It is one of dozens of programs the budget blueprint slates for elimination. The White House’s proposed budget would shrink the program from $7.5 million to $445,000, to be spent shutting down the work, according to the Network’s report.
Lung cancer
Radon is a naturally occurring radioactive gas that, when it seeps up from under a house, can pose health risks to occupants. The new budget would cut by 80 percent the $2.9 million in spending on a federal radon program and an $8 million grant program to states and tribes, the EPN report says. About 21,000 people a year die of lung cancer believed to be caused by radon.
Hazardous materials
The proposed budget removes a federal-state program that would computerize shipping manifests, currently maintained on paper, of trucks carrying hazardous materials. “Seems like a no-brainer,” Wyeth said of the modernization, “but it is eliminated.”
The passback suggests that the first version of the system, called E-Manifest, be completed using other, undedicated agency funding.
Airborne worries
The EPA spends about $92 million a year researching how air pollution affects people and nature and how best to control which pollutants. According to the group, the proposed budget would halve funding for a program the analysis lauds as a critical success. The EPA estimates that by 2020 Clean Air Act measures will reap $2 trillion a year in benefits for $65 million in costs.
Mexico, again
The White House budget proposal would eliminate the Border 2020 program, an EPA venture with Mexico’s Secretariat of the Environment and Natural Resources, the report says. The program helps communities north and south of the border cut pollution and secure access to cleaner air and water.