In an unprecedented bipartisan rebuke of the Trump administration’s environmental policies, four former administrators of the Environmental Protection Agency, including three who served in Republican administrations, testified on Capitol Hill Tuesday before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Gina McCarthy, who served as EPA administrator in the Obama administration, appeared as well. Despite their political differences, their message was strikingly uniform: The Trump administration’s environmental rollbacks and distortion and neglect of scientific data are endangering Americans’ health and the safety of all our citizens.
The administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush were well-known for their anti-environment, so-called pro-business deregulatory policies. Lee Thomas, William Reilly, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Christine Todd Whitman were all justifiably criticized for many policies they oversaw that prioritized corporate interests over those of the public. While their unified condemnation of the Trump administration’s wholesale corruption of the EPA’s mission may be dismissed as a case of “too little, too late,” it also signifies a rather remarkable consensus in terms of just how disgracefully Trump has transformed the EPA into an instrument to harm rather than help Americans.
One thing all of them appeared to agree on is the egregiousness of the Trump EPA’s deliberate efforts to ignore the existence, causes, and likely practical, real-time, real-world effects of man-made climate change on the country we all will be living in for the foreseeable future.
According to reporting by the website InsideClimate News,
"Our country continues to face serious challenges in protecting public health and natural resources," Reilly said, naming climate change and building community resiliency to address the impacts of extreme weather events, coastal erosion and sea level rise, among other challenges. He has criticized Trump's decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement.
Whitman, whose tenure in the younger Bush’s EPA was marked by ideological clashes with fossil-fuel profiteers such as Dick Cheney, appears to have shed her prior reluctance to speak out, condemning the current administration’s attempts to prevent the public from being made aware of the catastrophic scope and predictable impacts of climate change.
Christine Todd Whitman, EPA administrator under George W. Bush from 2001 to 2003, also talked about her growing concerns about the impact of climate change, particularly on the ocean that borders her home state of New Jersey, and about the risks to human health from pollution.
Whitman listed several "egregious actions" by the Trump EPA, including its plans to roll back vehicle emissions standards, repeal methane emissions from oil and gas operations, and relax regulations on toxic air pollution.
Thomas, who served in the Reagan administration, also decried the Trump administration’s well-documented attempts to subvert science by ignoring it.
"Does the Agency have adequate resources with the strong scientific capability it needs? Is it seeking input form key scientific advisory committees? Is it coordinating actively with the broad scientific community on research surrounding environmental issues? I don't think they do,”[he wrote].
Under the Trump administration, the Environmental Protection Agency has been essentially gutted, its staff replaced by pro-industry lobbyists, many with no scientific or environmental credentials whatsoever. In addition to its rollbacks of clean-water and clean-air rules, the administration has specifically targeted any policies or measures intended to address or predict the effects of the inexorable carbon-dioxide-based super-heating of our environment. According to Columbia University researchers, the Trump EPA has taken nearly 100 actions to undermine or reverse such protections. As a result of this onslaught against climate science, at least 1,600 career employees have left the EPA. Only one-quarter of those have been replaced.
The hearing was prompted by a letter authored by not four, but seven former EPA administrators, all urging Congress to exercise its responsibilities and powers of oversight over what has become essentially a rogue, taxpayer-funded federal agency dedicated to wrecking rather than protecting our environment.
Some of those signatories go back to the Nixon era, when the EPA was created. Which would seem to cement the notion that Trump’s is the most anti-environment administration in history.
And we're all paying for it.
