EPA Tragedy

"The Intercept"- online news website magazine
  by Sharon Lerner
March 24 2017, 7:56 a.m.

The EPA was created in 1970 in large part to right the power imbalance between industry and residents of polluted communities like St. John the Baptist. Richard Nixon was president at the time and appointed William Ruckelshaus, or “the enforcer,” as he came to be called, to lead the agency. Among Ruckelhaus’s victories was getting companies to comply with the newly passed law to curtail air pollution, the Clean Air Act. Ruckelshaus even managed to get Union Carbide, then a powerful chemical company, to reduce emissions at its plant in Marietta, Georgia, after the company initially threatened to fire workers if it was forced to comply with the EPA’s new pollution emissions schedule.

Forty-seven years later, our current scandal-ridden Republican president is handling environmental enforcement differently. Donald Trump, who threatened to eliminate the EPA entirely during his campaign, has instead installed as its administrator former Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, who built his career trying to undermine the agency. “Polluting Pruitt,” as some call him, has already begun making cuts that will eviscerate the EPA’s ability to protect Americans from dangerous industrial pollution.

The EPA declined to answer questions about specific cuts, but the new administration is likely to shrink or eliminate every branch of the agency that helped convey the risks of chloroprene to the people of St. John the Baptist. Leaked versions of the agency’s budget show that the administration plans to zero out funding for local air pollution monitoring. And cuts are expected to the regional offices.

Trump’s proposed budget also cuts most funding for the Office of Environmental Justice, which was devoted to protecting communities like the one in St. John the Baptist, according to Mustafa Ali, one of the founding members of that office. I spoke with Ali the morning he resigned from the agency he served for 25 years, most recently as the senior adviser for environmental justice and community revitalization. He told me he chose to leave because he has “a different set of values and priorities” from the new administration and that low-income communities and communities of color contend with disproportionate environmental pollution because, “lots of times, people don’t put as much value on their lives.”

IRIS, the only division of the agency that independently assesses the toxicity of industrial chemicals, is almost certain to fall victim to the cuts as well. The proposed budget calls for $2.6 billion in cuts to the EPA, including $233 million from the Office of Research in Development, which includes IRIS. Republicans on the House Science Committee had already made it clear at a hearing in February that elimination of IRIS was one of their three priorities for the EPA. And the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the think tank run by Myron Ebell, who headed Trump’s EPA transition team, identified IRIS as “top on the list” of environmental programs to cut.

“I’m sure it’s a key thing they want to get rid of, IRIS, because of how influential it is,” one EPA staff member told me. “If they kill that, they kill the ability to regulate. The whole world looks at an IRIS evaluation. It really does draw the line in the sand and tells people where the risk is. Once that’s defined, you can go back to the water concentration and the air concentration and show that you have to do something. Without IRIS, you might be able to measure something in the air or water, but you won’t have any proof that it’s a problem.”

Republicans have also targeted funding for both the International Agency for Research on Cancer and the National Institute for Environmental Health, which publishes the National Report on Carcinogens, the two other governmental bodies that recognized the cancer risk of chloroprene years ago. Together with IRIS, these two programs provide the only significant counterweight to industry’s own research. As we’ve seen many times before, that science is often biased by companies’ interest in maintaining the profitability of their products.