Budget Cuts Series: What's at Stake for EPA and Our Nation?

In SmartDissent's Budget Cuts Series, we are detailing many of the White House proposed budget cuts.  A prime eample of the importance of this series in the proposed impacts to the Environmental Protection Agency.  We seek to learn and share what's hidden beneath the surface.  While climate change denial and associated concerns have dominated the discussion of the massive funding cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency, far more is at stake in a variety of ways.

The Trump administration’s proposed cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency budget are deep and wide-ranging.  It seeks to shrink spending by 31 percent, to $5.7 billion from $8.1 billion, and to eliminate a quarter of the agency’s 15,000 jobs.

Below are some of the specific cuts with the potential for terrible and long-lasting impacts:

• Decrease grants that help states monitor public water systems by almost a third, to $71 million from $102 million

The Public Water System Supervision Grant Program has been critical in making sure communities have access to safe drinking water. In Texas, for example, state-contracted workers collect drinking water samples across the state, an effort funded in part by federal grants. Much of the risk to the country’s water supply stems from its crumbling public water infrastructure: a network of pipes, treatment plants and other facilities built decades ago. 

• Reduces spending on civil and criminal enforcement by almost 60 percent, to $4 million from a combined $10 million; eliminates 200 jobs. 

Sharp cuts in the agency’s enforcement programs could curtail its ability to police environmental offenders and impose penalties.....Just last week, the agency fined a subsidiary of the operator behind the Dakota Access pipeline, nearly $1 million over a 2012 spill.

• Elimination of virtually all regional clean-up programs - Chesapeake Bay, Gulf of Mexico, Lake Champlain, Long Island Sound, Puget Sound, San Francisco Bay, South Florida, the Great Lakes. 

Those projects amount to a loss of more than $400 million in federal funding for the regions involved. The largest part of that goes to the Great Lakes restoration effort, which is helping revive wetland habitats, clean up toxic pollution, combat invasive species and prevent runoff from farms and cities.  [C]ommunities could sue the E.P.A. for failing to act, ultimately running up the agency’s legal bills and slowing remediation...

• Reduction of Superfund and brownfield programs by 44 percent to $254 million from $452 million 

Superfund is as high-stakes as environmental programs get. It makes federal funds available for the cleanup of sites contaminated by hazardous substances and pollutants.  The Superfund program can actually save taxpayers money, because it lets the E.P.A. identify polluters and compel them to pay for the cleanup.   E.P.A. officials call Brownfields, a program that helps towns and cities redevelop former industrial sites, one of the agency’s most popular programs. The E.P.A. website still lists its success stories...

There are numerous other important programs and grants on the cutting board.  Please review at the source article below.

ACTION: Organizations such as the Natural Resources Defense Coucil, 350.org, the Sierra Club will be fighting hard against this administration.  Read up on their work at their web sites, follow them on Twitter, and give a donation to them or similar groups.  We need environmental groups to be well funded to fight this fight.  Their web sites have concrete ways you can get involved beyond giving them money if this fighting for this cause drives you.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/10/climate/trump-epa-budget-cuts.html