Hot off the presses is the Trump/Pruitt proposed 31% cut to the EPA’s budget, including slashing more than $300 million from the fund used to clean up the most toxic and dangerous sites in America, i.e., “Superfund” sites. If this cut passes Congress, thousands will get sick and others still will die because the contamination that the EPA would have cleaned up or mitigated will now be left in the environment to wreak havoc on our citizens, mostly children.
For the last 3 months, EPA Chief Pruitt has promised that such massive cuts made sense because the states were in a better position than the federal government to provide the necessary environmental protection.
Well, the new budget proposal reveals Pruitt’s promise to be a lie, as it proposes to slash the environmental grants to states by 45%, from $1.1 billion to $600 million. In other words, Pruitt wants to take away half of the states’ resources for fighting pollution, at the same time that he promises that they will fight more pollution.
Is Pruitt stupid, or does he think we are stupid?
Pruitt knows that the states can’t pick up the slack created by the federal government getting out of the business of environmental protection. The states don’t know what they are doing and were under-funded even under Obama. If Pruitt gets his way, they will be stripped of half of the resources they previously had.
Pruitt is not merely shifting environmental protection from the federal government to the states; he is eliminating environmental protection altogether.
He thinks his job is to make America safe not for those who are threatened by pollution, but for those who do the polluting.
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