The job of the Environmental Protection Agency is right there in the title. But under the leadership of first Scott Pruitt and now Andrew Wheeler, Trump has inverted the role of the office, turning it into a machine for disassembling every rule created to limit pollution of air, land, and sea. So, with the shutdown in place, Politico reports, the agency is actually doing less damage that it would if most of its staff were not furloughed.
Efforts to open new offshore areas along the coasts to oil and gas drilling are on hold. So is a push to end regulations on toxic pollution from coal-based power plants. So is a rollback of fuel efficiency requirements on passenger vehicles.
As a demonstration of just how awful the Trump EPA really is, the agency used its last remaining funds not to clean up some toxic site or monitor the health of the environment, but to slide out one last proposal: removing the limits on mercury and other heavy metals that emerge from power plants and destroy children’s brains.
It’s bad enough that the union representing workers at the agency is actually cheering for the fact that they are currently sidelined.
"Since most of the regulatory activity that EPA is doing is of the deregulatory nature, to me, that’s great for the health and the environment," said Mike Mikulka, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Chapter 704, which represents EPA employees in the Midwest.