Ignoring threats to environmental health, worker safety issues, economic fair play violations, labor standards infractions, and more is not the way to get the country through the COVID-19 crisis.
The EPA continues to put our health and climate at risk with its delay tactics, placing a stay on federal rules aimed at curbing smog-forming, cancer-causing methane emissions.
Not only does the executive order call for opening up huge swaths of the oceans to oil and gas drilling, it even questions recently designated or expanded national marine sanctuaries and marine monuments.
This could mean the evisceration of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as well as other federal agencies that put public health and environmental protection before polluter profits.
His new order authorizes the creation of a “regulatory reform task force” for every federal agency. Their mission: to seek out and eliminate regulations.
While the move brought some relief to state environmental agencies—which rely on federal funding for programs like pollution monitoring and cleanups—the hiring freeze and communications restrictions remain.
The executive order gives state governors the ability to fast-track a pipeline project by deeming it a “national priority”—such projects would then bypass public participation and environmental review.
In an unprecedented move, the administration has imposed not just a federal hiring freeze but also a suspension of grant awards and contracts by the EPA—which are for a wide range of functions, including important environmental testing work and remediation…
This freeze, which will make it more difficult for agencies to carry out their missions, is part of the opening salvo of Trump’s full-scale assault on our government’s ability to protect public health and the environment.