Trump's Budget Assault on the Environment Packs a Wallop

In addition to EPA cuts, Trump also wants billions in new investments in nuclear weapons and storage for commercial nuclear waste. (Photo: Mark Goebel/flickr/cc)

Trump's Budget Assault on the Environment Packs a Wallop

Donald Trump's first budget makes his antipathy to the environment clear--and his love for fossil fuels and nuclear power even clearer.

Donald Trump's first budget makes his antipathy to the environment clear--and his love for fossil fuels and nuclear power even clearer.

In addition to slashing funding to the Environmental Protection Agency, he also announced this week that he wants massive rollbacks in automotive fuel efficiency standards and billions in new investments in nuclear weapons and storage for commercial nuclear waste.

The administration's budget cuts $2.4 billion from the EPA's operating funds--roughly 31 percent--taking the agency's annual budget from $8.1 billion to $5.7 billion, the smallest since it was formed in 1970. These cuts will cripple regulation of air and water quality, strip oversight of a wide range of land management programs, and loosen restrictions on chemical emissions from industrial facilities.

Much of this money would be shifted directly over to the military, which the Trump Administration wants to bolster with an additional $54 billion over the final Obama allocations.

As Wenona Hauter, Executive Director of Food and Water Watch told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, the cuts would lower staff to about 11,800, in an agency that employed 17,000 in 2010 and, according to the Washington Post, about 15,000 today."We should be clear that 90 percent of EPA programs are run by state agencies," Hauter says."Half that staff is located in regional offices.

The cuts, says Hauter, would cripple the states' ability to protect clean air and water across the country.

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