The Environmental Protection Agency plans to shut down its Office of Research and Development, according to reporting from the New York Times. The result would be, essentially, something other than the Environmental Protection Agency.
A spokesperson said that the EPA is “is taking exciting steps as we enter the next phase of organizational improvements,” joining the Trump administration’s growing annals of euphemistic achievement. Part of the agency’s “reduction in force” plan, closing the ORD would eliminate more than 1,100 positions, many of them highly trained and highly skilled scientists tasked with establishing what, exactly, the pollution the agency is tasked with regulating does to us all.
From the EPA’s own website: “ORD conducts the research for EPA that provides the foundation for credible decision-making to safeguard human health and ecosystems from environmental pollutants.” The regulations that the EPA issues — well, used to issue — are based on incredibly detailed scientific assessments, of things like mercury’s impact on fetal development, or asthma rates downwind of power plants, and so on. The EPA’s RIF plan apparently would move what’s left of that office — maybe 25 percent of where it stands now — into other areas of the agency, in theory to “align with administration priorities.” Which means, of course, not doing the science or issuing the regulations at all.
When Trump announced Lee Zeldin as his nominee to run the EPA there was at least some confusion out there, as he is neither a rich oil executive nor a talking head on a channel Trump has in front of him a lot, just a failed New York governor candidate and former House rep without the sort of obvious ideological zealotry in his past that has filled much of the administration. And yet, here he is a couple of months later, engaging in one of the government’s most gleeful takedowns of a historically critical agency, writing op-eds touting the end of a “Green New Deal” that does not, in fact, exist.
It may not be quite as brazenly illegal as trying to close USAID or the Department of Education entirely, but if this RIF plan moves ahead as reported, along with last week’s flurry of deregulatory announcements, it is largely functionally equivalent. Removing the scientific expertise from the agency will allow the EPA to limp slowly along right where Trump and his rich friends want it — in the dark.
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