Washington Post - Juliet Eilperin | Brady Dennis
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| Environmental Protection Agency headquarters (Matt McClain/The Washington Post) |
The White House has proposed deep cuts to the Environmental
Protection Agency’s budget that would reduce the agency’s staff by
one-fifth in the first year and eliminate dozens of programs, according
to details of a plan reviewed by The Washington Post.
While
administration officials had already indicated that they intended to
increase defense spending at the expense of other discretionary funding,
the plan spells out exactly how this new approach will affect long-
standing federal programs that have a direct impact on
Americans’ everyday lives.
“The administration’s 2018 budget
blueprint will prioritize rebuilding the military and making critical
investments in the nation’s security,” the document says. “It will also
identify the savings and efficiencies needed to keep the nation on a
responsible fiscal path.”
The funding level proposed, which the
document says “highlights the trade-offs and choices inherent in
pursuing these goals,” could have a significant impact on the agency.
Its annual budget would drop from $8.2 billion a year to $6.1 billion.
And because much of that funding already goes to states and localities
in the form of grants, such cuts could have an even more significant
effect on the EPA’s core functions.
Though President Trump
professes to care strongly about clean air and clean water, almost no
other federal department or agency is as much in the crosshairs at the
moment. As a candidate, he vowed to get rid of the EPA “in almost every
form,” leaving only “little tidbits” intact. The man he chose to lead
the agency, former Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt, sued it more
than a dozen times in recent years, challenging its legal authority to
regulate such things as mercury pollution, smog and carbon emissions
from power plants.
The plan reflects those past sentiments. As
proposed, the EPA’s staff would be slashed from its current level of
15,000 to 12,000. Grants to states, as well as its air and water
programs, would be cut by 30 percent. The massive Chesapeake Bay cleanup
project would receive only $5 million in the next fiscal year, down
from its current $73 million.
In
addition, 38 separate programs would be eliminated entirely. Grants to
clean up brownfields, or abandoned industrial sites, would be gone. Also
zeroed out: the radon program, climate change initiatives and funding
for Alaskan native villages.
The agency’s Office of Research and Development could lose up to
42 percent of its budget, according to an individual apprised of the
administration’s plans. And the document eliminates funding altogether
for the office’s “contribution to the U.S. Global Change Research
Program,” a climate initiative that President George H.W. Bush launched
in 1989.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 25 in Oxon Hill, Md. (The Washington Post)
The staffing reductions, which could be accomplished through a buyout
offer as well as layoffs, were among several changes to which the EPA
staff was asked to react by the close of business Wednesday. Multiple
individuals briefed on the plan confirmed the request by the Office of
Management and Budget, which did not immediately respond to a request
for comment.
The document acknowledges that the cuts “will create
many challenges” but suggests that “by looking ahead and focusing on
clean water, clean air and other core responsibilities, rather than
activities that are not required by law, EPA will be able to effectively
achieve its mission.”
Any
cuts would have to be codified through the congressional appropriations
process and would probably face resistance from some lawmakers. Rep.
Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), a former chairman of the House Appropriations
subcommittee on interior, environment and related agencies, said he did
not think Congress would approve such a steep drop in funding.
“There’s
not that much in the EPA, for crying out loud,” he said, noting that
Republicans had already reduced the agency’s budget dramatically in
recent years.
Jennifer Hing, a spokeswoman for the House
Appropriations Committee, declined to comment Wednesday on the cuts
targeted but said in an email that the panel “will carefully look at the
budget proposal once it is sent to Congress.”
The
EPA also would not comment on the budget proposal. But its new
administrator cautioned this week that the particulars of the budget
remain in flux.
“I am concerned about the grants that have been
targeted, especially around water infrastructure, and those very
important state revolving funds,” Pruitt told the publication E&E
News after Trump’s address to Congress on Tuesday. He said he already
had spoken with OMB Director Mick Mulvaney about the agency’s funding.
“What’s
important for us is to educate OMB on what the priorities of the agency
are, from water infrastructure to Superfund, providing some of those
tangible benefits to our citizens,” he said, “while at the same time
making sure that we reallocate, re-prioritize in our agency to do
regulatory reform to get back within the bounds of Congress.”
It
is unclear whether Pruitt’s appeal would produce any changes: The
document states that any requests from agencies to increase or
reallocate funds must be accompanied by budgetary offsets. Those could
include “alternative funding cuts, balance cancellations or viable user
fees.”
It instructs agency officials to “make sure any appeal is consistent with campaigns or other policy statements.”
Agencies
must submit any alternative budget proposals to OMB’s Office of
Information and Regulatory Affairs by Friday, the document states, and
OMB will convene a meeting April 15 to discuss the “initial draft of the
workforce reduction plan.”
As details of the blueprint
emerged, environmental advocates and the EPA’s most recent administrator
blasted the White House proposal.
“This budget is a fantasy if
the administration believes it will preserve EPA’s mission to protect
public health,” Gina McCarthy, who served as the agency’s leader from
2013 through the end of the Obama administration, said in a statement
Wednesday.
“It ignores the need to invest in science and to
implement the law,” she said. “It ignores the lessons of history that
led to EPA’s creation 46 years ago. And it ignores the American people
calling for its continued support.”
S.
William Becker, executive director of the National Association of Clean
Air Agencies, said in an email that the proposed budget would devastate
critical federal financial support for communities across the country.
“These
cuts, if enacted by Congress, will rip the heart and soul out of the
national air pollution control program and jeopardize the health and
welfare of tens of millions of people around the country,” Becker said.
The
instructions to the EPA signal how the new administration plans to
delegate many responsibilities to the states even as it decreases the
money they will receive from the federal government.
The document
directs the agency to get states “to assume more active enforcement
roles” when it comes to federal environmental standards. In addition,
it says, the agency should curtail its compliance-monitoring activities.
“Basically,
the direction is to reduce enforcement, which is already pretty
strained,” said Eric Shaeffer, head of the Environmental Integrity
Project, an advocacy group, and a former head of the EPA’s Office of
Regulatory Enforcement. He noted that state programs are often “woefully
underfunded” and at the mercy of state politics and pressure from large
companies.
Environmental justice activists are particularly alarmed at what they may face with the new administration.
The
document states that it supports the idea of environmental justice, but
it would eliminate that EPA office and “assumes any future EJ specific
policy work can be transferred to the Office of Policy.”
On the
South Side of Chicago, the neighborhood where Cheryl Johnson lives is
known as “the toxic doughnut” because of the 200 leaking underground
storage tanks and 50 landfills there.
The EPA office has given
People for Community Recovery, for which Johnson is the executive
director, and other organizations money to conduct technical assessment
of local facilities and provide training to educate residents. And,
Johnson added, it also has provided a place where residents could appeal
to force local polluters to come into compliance with federal
standards.
Losing
that resource “would devastate a community like mine,” she said. It
would be “like putting us in a chamber, to be disposed of.”
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