A few weeks ago, we learned that the Trump regime was planning to take a chainsaw to the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget, knocking it down by 25 percent. This anticipated cut was no surprise. The bipartisan-founded agency has long been on the Republican hit list. Crushing the agency’s protective regulations has been touted as a job creator and relief for businesses’ bottom-line.
The gouging of the EPA budget announced Thursday goes deeper still. In fact, it’s a cut $1.4 billion more than Scott Pruitt, the new EPA-hating chief of the EPA, had sought. The current budget of $8.1 billion, having absorbed 20 percent in cuts since 2010, is the lowest in 30 years, when adjusted for inflation. It makes up just 0.2 percent of the total federal budget. The Trump budget would cut EPA to the level of more than 40 years ago, adjusted for inflation.
More than 50 agency programs are to be sent to the slaughterhouse while others will merely be maimed, generating a reduction of $347 million. Among these is a proposed $100 million chop of several climate-related programs. Brady Dennis and Juliet Eilperin report:
Thursday’s proposal by the White House would slash the EPA’s budget by 31 percent — nearly one third — from its current level of $8.1 billion to $5.7 billion. It would cut 3,200 positions, or more than 20 percent of the agency’s current workforce of about 15,000.
“You can’t drain the swamp and leave all the people in it. So, I guess the first place that comes to mind will be the Environmental Protection Agency,” Mick Mulvaney, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, told reporters. “The president wants a smaller EPA. He thinks they overreach, and the budget reflects that.” [...]
“[Cuts beyond the 20 percent already absorbed] won’t just drastically reduce EPA enforcement, it will bring it to a halt,” [said Cynthia Giles, who headed the EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance during the Obama administration]: “Not only will the staff be a shadow of its former self, the inspectors, lawyers and criminal agents who would be left would be unable to do their jobs, because these cuts would zero out the already small amount of funds used to do inspections, monitor pollution and file cases.”
John O'Grady, head of a union that represents EPA employees, told CNN: "The U.S. EPA is already on a starvation diet, with a bare-bones budget and staffing level. The administration's proposed budget will be akin to taking away the agency's bread and water."
The proposed budget, of course, has a big problem. As Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina said in February before the details we now have were announced: “It’s dead on arrival. It’s not going to happen. It would be a disaster.” But it certainly shows what our overlords have in mind if they ever do get to pass a budget.
Americans don’t support this attack. In a Reuters poll conducted in January, 61 percent of respondents said they want to see the EPA strengthened or kept as it is, with just 19 percent saying they want to see it weakened or demolished.