Trump builds industry-friendly EPA
President Donald Trump told Fox Business News on April 13: “We’ve done an amazing job on regulations. We’ve freed it up. We freed up this country so much.”
Last month, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Scott Pruitt, freed up the country to continue using a pesticide called chlorpyrifos on everything from strawberries and almonds to Brussels sprouts and broccoli.
This despite a warning from the National Institutes of Health that chlorpyrifos can cause “adverse developmental, reproductive, neurological and immune effects” in human beings. This despite scientific studies indicating that chlorpyrifos can interfere with fetal brain development, leading to higher rates of autism and lower intelligence.
Protecting industry is likely to be more important than protecting consumers in an EPA run by Pruitt, the former attorney general of Oklahoma with a history of fighting the EPA. Trump recently sent him some help in the person of Nancy Beck, who was named the EPA’s deputy assistant administrator for chemical safety and pollution prevention. This is the office that regulates toxic chemicals.
Beck’s previous job: senior director of regulatory science policy for the American Chemical Council. In this job, she challenged scientific studies unfavorable to the chemical industry. During the George W. Bush administration, she analyzed toxic chemicals for the Office of Management and Budget. In 2009, the House Science Committee criticized her for “rewriting the ‘science’” on some policy issues.
When science is in dispute, it’s the job of regulators to decide when risks outweigh rewards. The EPA took 15 years to decide that yes, they did. It took the Trump EPA about 15 minutes to decide that no, they didn’t. Wash your kids’ food very carefully.
Arkansas hurried to hold executions
There is one obvious takeaway from Arkansas’ chaotic and misguided attempt to execute eight death row prisoners in a span of 11 days, including two who were put to death Monday evening and one on Thursday.
Why these eight men, and why now? All eight had been sitting on death row since at least 2000 — one since 1989, when President George H.W. Bush was in office.
On top of that, Arkansas had not executed a death row inmate since 2005 and seemed in no hurry to do so — until the state discovered that its Midazolam, a controversial lethal injection drug, expired at the end of April. This is the same drug administered in flawed executions in Oklahoma and Arizona, where witnesses said the inmates writhed in apparent pain on the gurney.
Are drug expiration dates our new standard of justice?
As Arkansas abruptly scheduled this execution binge, it touched off a flurry of state and federal legal challenges from the eight inmates. Various courts blocked four of the executions. However, inmate Ledell Lee, convicted in 1993 of killing a 26-yearold woman, was executed last week, after the Supreme Court declined to stay the execution so that he could obtain DNA testing. Two convicted murders, Jack Jones and Marcel Williams, also lost appeals and were executed Monday night, making Arkansas the first state since 2000 to carry out two death sentences on one day.
When a life-and-death decision comes down to something so random, we all should be outraged.