That stands for Make American Polluted Again. I’m not saying that all the pollution has disappeared. It’s just that President Trump today announced plans to gut the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The New York Times reports that Trump has directed EPA’s new administrator, Lee Zeldin, to cut its budget and/or staffing by 65%. EPA is far from perfect, but over the years it has not only combatted pollution of the air, land, and water, but it has increasingly engaged the public in the oversight of its activities. These cuts will slow or stop cleanups, weaken regulation of polluters, and undermine the agency’s critical scientific research. This is not efficiency, or the removal of waste, fraud, and abuse. Rather, it’s opening the figurative floodgates to additional damage to public health and the environment. It’s likely to halt EPA’s efforts to monitor, understand, and address PFAS “Forever Chemicals,” just as it’s getting started. (That’s one of the things I’m working on these days.) Mixing metaphors, Trump is “flooding the zone.” That is, he hopes that the numerous attacks on our government orchestrated by Elon Musk will overwhelm the public and the opposition. But if we want clean air and water, hypocritically promised by Trump, we need to step up and defend EPA. Lenny Notes: My organization receives a tiny amount of money from EPA, and before Trump first took office in 2027, we relied heavily on EPA grants and contracts. Please excuse the duplicative postings.
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Lenny Siegel
Executive Director
Center for Public Environmental Oversight
A project of the Pacific Studies Center
LSiegel@cpeo.org
P.O. Box 998, Mountain View, CA 94042
Voice/Fax: 650-961-8918
http://www.cpeo.org Author: DISTURBING THE WAR: The Inside Story of the Movement to Get Stanford University out of Southeast Asia - 1965–1975 (See http://a3mreunion.org)
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