by Dot Armstrong
President Trump’s 2018 monetary plan makes the future of government budgeting look like a slasher film — “Nightmare on Pennsylvania Avenue.” Like Freddie Kruger, Trump cuts every agency within reach. Many organizations hemorrhage money in this twisted budgetary fantasy. But one casualty should worry us more than any other. Trump proposed to defund the Environmental Protection Agency, a suggestion worse than building both the DAPL and the Keystone XL pipelines.
Evidently, Trump realized the backlash of such a serious gouge might offend someone, so he performed a quasi-relevant gesture to smooth things over. During a recent press conference, a dazed Press Secretary Sean Spicer offered Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zincke a check for $78,333. That’s Trump’s first-quarter salary. The EPA stands to lose $2.4 billion.
If the EPA suffers the huge cuts Trump has proposed, the programs Obama installed to lower emissions and mitigate pollution will disappear. The Clean Air Act of 1970 — a key initiative that reduced the presence of six harmful pollutants by 70 percent between 1970 and 2015, according to EPA reports — will only receive half of its former funding. Studies conducted by the EPA Office of Chemical Safety and Prevention on endocrine disruptors (chemicals that may seriously compromise childhood development and reproductive health) will be hamstrung by lack of funding. And the list goes on.
Trump’s strategy: Leave these issues up to the states. Clearly, an irresponsible and lazy idea. Environmental concerns, whether nitrates in water or regulations on auto exhaust, have complex and wide-ranging effects, and independent states cannot take complete responsibility for their environmental impacts. And without federal authority mandating concern over emissions, many states may not adhere to former high standards of environmental accountability. Though such a strategy would benefit states such as California — radically committed to curtailing emissions and unconcerned with the rest of the nation’s regressions — Trump’s laissez-faire approach would only increase the nationwide contention around environmental issues.
Single states share the burden of pollution and habitat destruction, linked in an inextricable network. The Great Lakes Restoration Initiative exemplifies this connectivity. The EPA, under Obama, instituted a program to clean up the Great Lakes in 2010. The five freshwater lakes create an inland shore along Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, New York, and a corner of Pennsylvania. This chain forms the largest reservoir of fresh surface water in the world. The Great Lakes Restoration website describes the five areas the initiative addresses: toxic substances (“areas of concern”), invasive species, non-point-source pollution, habitat and species protection, and future restoration efforts. Under Trump, individual states would assume responsibility for these massive ecosystem stabilization and resource-management projects.
The president’s budget exemplifies the counterintuitive posturing of the Trump administration. Exhortations to “Make America Great Again” ought to inspire nationwide unity about protecting our natural resources. Resiliency and responsibility should define our country’s greatness, not remarkable stubbornness in the face of growing environmental stress. Such a slogan should motivate us to improve upon the legacy of the Obama administration rather than cut it down.
