Though some Republicans have called for getting rid of the EPA altogether, the Trump regime has a different plan: Keep the agency around in name only but stop enforcing environmental laws.
The Trump administration is considering closing down the enforcement division of the Environmental Protection Agency, according to a report Wednesday evening from Inside EPA.
Destroying the Office of Enforcement & Compliance Assurance would mean getting rid of the people who specialize in seeing that environmental regulations are actually followed, and dropping this responsibility back onto the departments. It means that the people who have the backgrounds to work with law enforcement and the courts would be gone, and any action would have to be taken by the people who currently work in performing analysis or conducting research.
It’s a formula designed to both cripple the EPA’s data collection and all but eliminate the enforcement of laws.
OECA handles both civil and criminal enforcement of the country’s core environmental laws, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Oil Pollution Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act. The office is an independent body with about 3,000 employees who “work to advance environmental justice by protecting communities most vulnerable to pollution.”
Republicans in Congress have already repealed regulations protecting streams from mining waste and limiting disposal of methane that accelerates global warming. They were thinking too small. What does it matter if there are regulations, when there is no one to enforce them?
The idea of destroying the OECA mirrors actions that Trump’s EPA nominee carried out in Oklahoma.
Environmental advocates were quick to point out that Scott Pruitt ― the Oklahoma attorney general Trump picked to lead the EPA ― made almost the same move back home. Pruitt closed his office’s Environmental Protection Unit not long after he took office in 2011.
But destroying the EPA’s ability to enforce regulations may just be one step in a plan to leave the agency little more than a shell.
Myron Ebell, a climate change denier who led the Trump administration’s transition at the EPA before returning to the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, noted in an email with HuffPost that most environmental enforcement efforts were largely the responsibility of individual offices before the creation of the OECA in the 1990s. Ebell has previously recommended the agency slash its workforce by two-thirds, from about 15,000 to 5,000 employees, and cut the EPA budget in half.
What Ebell isn’t saying is that, since the creation of the OECA, the workers with the background and experience in enforcement have been moved to that office. The size of the cuts that Ebell is suggesting—which have come with no detail, and with a refusal to name specific programs—would utterly cripple the agency, and limit its ability to both provide federal data required by law and provide data used at the state level.
Following these steps would allow the Republicans to have it both ways. They could proclaim that they hadn’t destroyed the EPA, but do so with a wink as they let polluting businesses know that all bets were off.
They’re ready to “make America gray again”—under a blanket of soot.