The Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency of the United States is a stupid fucking asshole and that's why Fucktard Trump gave him the job.
The idea is to protect the environment. Fucktard Scott Pruitt, chosen by Fucktard Trump, wants to destroy the environment. I'm not making this up. Trump, you fucking moron, drop dead.
I'm going to copy & paste some stuff because it's important. People need to know this stupid fucking asshole is trying to destroy America.
Los Angeles Times - EPA chief's clean-water rollback shaped by secrecy, luxury travel and handpicked audiences
By EVAN HALPER MARCH 02, 2018 WASHINGTON
As Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt jetted around the country last year, regularly flying first or business class at hefty taxpayer expense, his stated mission was often a noble one: to hear from Americans about how Washington could most effectively and fairly enforce the Clean Water Act.
Yet when Pruitt showed up in North Dakota in August to seek guidance on how to rewrite a landmark Obama-era water protection rule, it was clear there were some voices he did not care to hear.
The general public was barred from participating in the roundtable Pruitt presided over at the University of North Dakota. An EPA official even threatened to call security on reporters who tried to linger.
What happened at the meeting is still a mystery to all but the invitees, a list dominated by industry and Pruitt's political allies. The same is true of many of the other 16 such roundtables Pruitt held as he developed his plan to weaken a federal rule that protects the drinking water of 117 million Americans.
Such behind-closed-doors deliberation is a hallmark of the agency under Pruitt, an EPA administrator who spent $25,000 to set up a secure phone booth in his office and said security concerns guided his luxury plane travel. Pruitt's security detail said flying in coach exposed him to too much interaction with hostile members of the public. Under fire for the costly plane tickets, which were revealed in records obtained by the nonprofit watchdog Environmental Integrity Project, Pruitt said this week he would start trying to fly coach when possible.
But the buffer Pruitt has created from critical elements of the public extends beyond his choice of airline seating. It also defines decision making at his agency.
Pruitt purged scientists from an independent EPA advisory board that, among other things, rigorously reviewed the science behind the Obama water rule and found it to be sound. An EPA regulatory reform task force advising Pruitt on the rollback of clean water and air rules operates largely in the shadows. Pruitt's advisors ordered economic data that reflected the benefits of Obama's water rule erased from a key federal report, over the objections of career staff at the EPA.
Pruitt rejects any suggestion he is bending the rules. He says the agency is working "through the robust public process of providing long-term regulatory certainty across all 50 states about what waters are subject to federal regulation."
The effort is aimed at removing federal Clean Water Act protection from millions of miles of streams and wetlands, including more than 80% of the waters in California and the arid West. In January, the administration suspended for two years the new guidelines protecting those waters as it scrambles to draft a replacement rule that substantially narrows the reach of the act.
Pruitt is, indeed, making a robust effort to connect with stakeholders — spending a lot of public dollars along the way. But his audiences are typically handpicked, and almost always industry-friendly.
While EPA officials say others have ample opportunity to be heard through pro-forma comment filings, webinars and occasional meetings with staff, many communities feel shut out.
"No outreach at all was done here," the Navajo Nation protested in a letter to the EPA weeks before it suspended the clean water rule. The letter contrasted the hasty suspension of the rule with the four years of tribal consultation and scientific review that went into creating it.
There were no such complaints from the National Cattlemen's Beef Assn., which not only hosted Pruitt on a Colorado ranch, but also persuaded him to star in its advocacy video filmed there. The video urges ranchers to lobby the EPA to weaken the rule. Earlier on the day of the ranch visit, a commercial flight delay moved Pruitt to spend $5,700 of public money on a short-hop charter so he and staff members could stay on schedule.
In the video, Pruitt accused the Obama administration of "reimagining" its authority to define waters deserving federal protection to include even puddles — which the previous administration said it had specifically excluded from protection. The attorneys general of nine states, including California, cited the video as evidence that Pruitt, who had sued to scrap the Obama water rule while attorney general of Oklahoma, is not approaching the rewrite with an open mind, as the law requires.
In Pruitt's home state of Oklahoma, the EPA spent $14,400 to charter a plane so Pruitt and his staff could hear from several dozen farmers eager to repeal the rule in the town of Guymon. Soon after, the state of North Dakota spent $2,100 to ferry Pruitt and a couple of staffers to the closed-door meeting there. During the North Dakota visit, EPA staff directed a radio host scheduled to interview Pruitt not to take calls from listeners, according to agency emails published by E&E News. The emails also revealed how EPA staff insisted the roundtable be closed to reporters. "Pruitt does not want open press," said one message.
At the roundtable in Iowa, the Iowa Farm Bureau president and several farmers opposed to the water rule got invites. In South Carolina, some media was allowed into a meeting dominated by interests opposed to the water rule, including the state Home Builders Assn., the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce, the South Carolina Golf Course Assn. and the state Farm Bureau. In Minnesota, Pruitt went straight from a visit with the governor to the offices of the agriculture industry association AgriGrowth, where he presided over another roundtable.
EPA officials said in a statement that information from the roundtables will ultimately be uploaded into the public docket. They did not specify what information that would include or when that would happen.
The agency's caginess has drawn an onslaught of open-records lawsuits seeking basic information about who EPA officials are meeting with, when, and what Pruitt is saying in his many invite-only discussions with industry groups and conservative think tanks.
"One of the tragedies of this administration's approach is that it is just enhancing mistrust of what government is doing," said William Ruckelshaus, who demanded full transparency of all such agency meetings when he ran the EPA during the Nixon and Reagan administrations.
California Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra expressed confidence during a visit to Washington this week that Pruitt's rollbacks of policies like the clean water rule are so tainted by conflicts and legally troublesome administrative shortcuts that they will collapse in court.
The challenges Pruitt confronts include explaining the reams of data the EPA had compiled indicating that the economic benefits of keeping pollution out of the disputed streams and wetlands far outweigh the costs to farmers, developers and other business owners. The Obama rules were grounded in 1,200 scientific studies and 400 listening sessions over a period of years.
Longtime EPA staffers were stunned when political appointees at the agency last year directed them to write in a key report that protecting wetlands, intermittent streams and vernal pools would not bring any economic benefit to anyone. A detailed EPA analysis had already found that up to $500 million in benefits would be reaped by a range of interests, including commercial fisheries, recreational outfitters and drinking water utilities.
"We were told to just drop the benefits," said Betsy Southerland, who resigned her post as director of science and technology at the EPA Office of Water in August. "They told us verbally, so they wouldn't have a written record of it." An EPA spokesman downplayed the importance of the study, saying it was not required to rewrite the water rule.
Yet Pruitt's allies in Congress are clearly concerned the effort to unravel the Obama rule will falter. They are advancing a measure that would exempt the rollback from many of the public disclosure and other rules that apply to major regulatory changes.
The battle is being watched closely in California and the Southwest, where much of the water supply is linked to seasonal bodies of water and wetlands that would lose federal protection under Pruitt's vision.
"The drinking water 1 in 3 Americans consumes is linked to these types of streams," said Ken Kopocis, who was the chief EPA water official under Obama. "In California, it is the water that comes down from the mountains from the snow and rain. If the streams up in those in hills are no longer protected, you can pollute those waters free from any federal Clean Water Act responsibilities and it will end up in these reservoirs. It applies to all these feeder streams, whether in Montana or Nebraska or Ohio. This water gets captured and used by 117 million people."
"How do you maintain a healthy ecosystem if you destroy those feeders?" he said. "You simply can't."
In some states, lawmakers are moving to backstop the protections as best they can. California is particularly energized. In others, they are eager to see the rule disappear, amid a vocal organizing effort by the industries that align with Pruitt. Farmers, ranchers and homebuilders complain the rules expose them to all manner of liability. They say filling a drainage ditch or a puddle on their property could draw costly EPA enforcement actions against them under the Waters of the United States rule drafted by Obama's EPA.
Pruitt complained of overzealous puddle and ditch enforcement in the Cattlemen's video.
It's a point of view that is not necessarily shared widely in his own agency.
"We are not running around regulating ditches," said Jessica Kao, who recently left her post as the EPA's lead Clean Water Act enforcement attorney in the Southwest. "That whole argument is a red herring."
evan.halper@latimes.com Follow me: @evanhalper
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Washington Post - Trump budget seeks 23 percent cut at EPA, eliminating dozens of programs
By Brady Dennis February 12 Email the author
The White House is seeking to cut more than $2.5 billion from the annual budget of the Environmental Protection Agency — an overall reduction of more than 23 percent.
The fiscal 2019 proposal released Monday marks the Trump administration’s latest attempt to shrink the reach of an agency the president once promised to reduce to “little tidbits.” The EPA already has lost hundreds of employees to buyouts and retirements over the past year, and its staffing is now at Reagan-era levels.
Under the latest budget, the agency would continue to shrink in size and ambition, leaving much more of the work of environmental protection to individual states. The administration said Monday that its proposal will help “return the EPA to its core mission,” reduce “unnecessary reporting burdens on the regulated community,” and eliminate programs that “create unnecessary redundancies or those that have served their purpose and accomplished their mission.”
But environmental groups on Monday were quick to criticize the proposal, calling it a thinly veiled attempt to gut federal environmental safeguards.
“The Trump administration budget released today is a blueprint for a less healthy, more polluted America,” Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, said in a statement. “A budget shows your values — and this budget shows the administration doesn’t value clean air, clean water, or protecting Americans from toxic pollution.”
The administration’s plan would cut several dozen programs altogether. Among them: funding for state radon-detection initiatives; assistance to fund water system improvements along the U.S.-Mexico border; and partnerships to monitor and restore water quality in the Gulf of Mexico, Puget Sound and other large bodies of water. Funding for the restoration of the Chesapeake Bay would fall from $72 million to $7 million, and a similar program for the Great Lakes would be cut from $300 million to $30 million — although neither would be wiped out.
The head of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation called the proposal “another assault on clean water, from a president who campaigned saying he valued it.”
“This administration says they want to partner with states, but a 90 percent budget reduction says the opposite,” William C. Baker said in a statement. “The Chesapeake Bay Program is the glue that holds the state/federal partnership together. A cut of this magnitude would severely damage Bay restoration efforts, just at a time when we are seeing significant progress.”
In addition, the Trump budget would eliminate — or very nearly eliminate — the agency’s programs related to climate change. Funding for the agency’s Office of Science and Technology would drop by more than a third, from $762 million to $489 million. And funding for prosecuting environmental crimes and for certain clean air and water programs would drop significantly.
The Superfund cleanup program, a priority of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, would not face the same draconian reductions as were proposed last year. The agency expects to use the $1 billion fund “to reduce administrative costs, identify efficiencies, and prioritize the cleanup of sites.”
The agency also would receive an additional $397 million to bolster investment in wastewater and storm water infrastructure. The White House is no longer seeking to eliminate the Energy Star program, although it would be funded entirely through fees.
The fiscal 2019 proposal comes a year after the Trump administration proposed slashing the EPA’s budget by 31 percent, as well as cutting 3,200 positions, or more than 20 percent of the agency’s workforce.
“You can’t drain the swamp and leave all the people in it. So I guess the first place that comes to mind will be the Environmental Protection Agency,” Mick Mulvaney, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, told reporters at the time. “The president wants a smaller EPA. He thinks they overreach, and the budget reflects that.”
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Sun Sentinel - Trump budget cuts threaten Florida's waters | Editorial
Florida’s drinking water, as well as its waterways and beaches, could suffer from President Donald Trump’s push to slash spending at the Environmental Protection Agency. Congress needs to say no.
Federal help to fight water pollution in Florida is among potential casualties of Trump’s pledge to cut the EPA’s $8 billion budget by 30 percent.
A new report from the Environmental Defense Fund warns that Trump’s proposed cuts could cost Florida millions used to combat pollution that fouls beaches, pollutes lakes and rivers and threatens drinking water supplies.
During the past five years, Florida benefited from about $600 million in EPA grants that fund efforts such as cleaning up or preventing water pollution. But if Trump’s budget cuts had been in effect, the state would have received less than half of that, according to the report from the environmental advocacy group.
Losing that money would put Florida’s tourist-attracting waterways and beaches at risk, as well as the drinking water the state’s growing population needs.
When Congress considers budget measures in September, it should reject the president’s proposed deep cuts to the federal agency that helps protect Florida’s waters.
Trump’s cuts could mean ending the pollution-fighting National Estuary Program at a time when Florida is trying to avoid more toxic algae blooms along the coast.
Last year, pollution-fueled algae blooms produced a foul-smelling, green ooze that spread across waterways near Stuart — making waters unsafe for fishing and swimming — and scared away tourists to boot. Trump’s proposed cuts could do away with the EPA program that during the past five years has directed nearly $12 million in help to Florida’s estuaries, according to the Environmental Defense Fund report.
The cuts could also hamper efforts to make sure waters off Florida’s beaches are safe for swimming. The state received nearly $3 million in federal funding during the past five years to test for fecal matter and other pollutants, according to the report.
The EPA has been a popular target for Trump and other Republicans who complain that the federal agency’s pollution-fighting regulations hamper businesses and stifle job creation. Long before running for office, Trump in 2011 tweeted that the EPA was, “an impediment to both growth and jobs.”
During the campaign, Trump singled out the department that enforces environmental regulations as an example of something he would get rid of “in almost every form.”
“We’re going to have little tidbits left, but we’re going to take a tremendous amount out,” Trump said during the March 4, 2016 presidential debate in Detroit.
Trump picked an EPA administrator, former Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt, who had long fought the regulatory agency he now oversees. Also, Pruitt has questioned whether man-made pollution is the primary cause of climate change.
Under Pruitt, the EPA has rolled back pollution limits on power plants and is seeking to rein in water pollution regulations.
In May, Pruitt defended the president’s proposed budget cutbacks as an effort that “respects the American taxpayer” while still enabling the EPA to support its “highest priorities.” But Pruitt’s priorities for the EPA are far short of the protections that Florida waters need.
And Trump’s campaign pledges to help businesses by cutting federal regulations shouldn’t mean sacrificing pollution protections that would put Florida’s drinking water and public health at risk.
Diminishing programs that guard Florida’s waterways will end up hurting — not helping — businesses in a state dependent on tourism.
If Congress does back the president’s EPA budget cuts, that could shift more of those costs to state and local taxpayers.
Trump, who makes frequent Florida visits, doesn’t have to look far from his Mar-a-Lago Club to find examples of the need for the EPA’s pollution fighting efforts.
Recently, beaches near Mar-a-Lago were temporarily closed due to high bacteria levels typically blamed on pollution. And last year’s toxic algae blooms fouled waters less than an hour’s drive north of Trump’s Palm Beach estate.
Trying to save money by making big cuts to the EPA’s budget will make it harder to prevent and respond to those types of pollution emergencies in the future.
Also, while Trump’s nearly $3 billion in proposed EPA cuts risk efforts to fight pollution, the cuts would do little to trim the federal government’s nearly $600 billion budget deficit.
Congress and the president need to ensure that protecting Florida’s waters from pollution remains a federal priority, not a budget sacrifice.
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