Trump's Telling Moves With the EPA
While many doubt the seriousness of the cuts proposed in Project 2025, and that Donald Trump will use the conservative playbook as his bible, we can look to his first round of EPA cuts to guide us.
President Biden has been moving quickly in the last four years to piece together the remains of the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) following the tenure of Donald Trump. During his first term in office, Trump drastically reduced the EPA’s budget and the number of agency officials in 2017, by massively scaling back federal regulations and reducing its enforcement actions.
At the time Trump had initially appointed Scott Pruitt — an Oklahoma State official who had repeatedly sued the EPA — to lead the agency in 2017. More than 700 employees and 200 scientists were exiting their posts within the federal agency and hundreds of EPA employees had exited their posts through the process of buyouts, early retirement and quitting.
Under Trump, the EPA, along with other critical federal agencies, was placed on a hiring freeze and 350 federal positions sat empty at the EPA. When Pruitt left his post at the EPA following a series of odd scandals and missteps, Trump positioned a fossil fuel lobbyist at the head of the agency to take his place. The initial Trump administration hiring freeze at the EPA was extended, and employees were enticed with separation incentives to encourage early resignations.
During this time, employees at the EPA attempted to let the public know that Trump’s political appointees were improperly seeking to influence the scientific processes. The EPA also disbanded two of its science advisory committees and replaced scientists on other committees.
Under Trump, employees ultimately reported feeling disenchanted, disempowered and skeptical about the value of their public service within the agency. In a 2018 survey by the Union of Concerned Scientists, nearly 70% of employees at the EPA had acknowledged that senior decision-makers from regulated industries had inappropriately influenced the ongoing actions within the agency.
The Biden administration in 2020 quickly moved to empower the EPA regulatory and enforcement reach by bringing in new infrastructure funding, rescinding the hiring-freeze employed by Trump and attempting to put all of the regulation rollbacks back in place through Executive Orders. Project 2025, which will be the playbook from which Trump executes many of his new administration’s orders, calls for eliminating offices and laboratories within the EPA, and firing those newest Biden hires that are deemed to be in “low-value programs.”
Trump has nominated Lee Zeldin to lead the second slash and burn process, calling him a “true fighter for America First policies,” which basically just means Zeldin will do anything Trump wants him to do to help tear down another federal agency. Trump claims that Zeldin “will ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses, while at the same time maintaining the highest environmental standards, including the cleanest air and water on the planet.”
Given Trump’s actions during his first administration we can take this statement to mean that Zeldin will slim down the EPA even more in order to allow corporate businesses to continue to profit off of the deregulated backs of all Americans. While it might be more difficult to apply this type of destructive blueprint to an agency that oversees more critical concerns, like national security, it is safe to say that the same tactics employed by Trump to disregard any real environmental protections in the United States, will surely be used again in order to cut back on federal funding for the EPA, even more than the first time.
Below are several articles published at SHERO during the first Trump administration, which detail how the federal agency was stripped down to bare parts, with the professionals who were left to watch the carnage, unable to do anything to stop it. While these actions within the EPA might not translate directly to other federal agencies that Donald Trump will attempt to gut under Project 2025, these are some basic moves from the Trump administration that we should expect, using the template of the EPA, which was no doubt the federal guinea pig for drastically cutting up and picking apart other essential federal agencies.
Amee Vanderpool writes the SHERO Newsletter, is an attorney, published author, contributor to newspapers and magazines, and an analyst for BBC radio. She can be reached at avanderpool@gmail.com or follow her on Twitter @girlsreallyrule.
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Sickening. Thank you for keeping us apprised.
not my president, with no respect at all, fuck that guy.