Trump Just Ordered Government Scientists to Hide Facts From the Public

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TOM PHILPOTT JAN. 24, 2017 7:24 PM

Throughout Trump's campaign, he and his proxies consistently expressed hostility to government regulation, particularly of the fossil fuel and agriculture industries. Within days of taking over, the Trump Administration has already put a squeeze on the two agencies that most directly regulate Big Energy and Big Ag, the Environmental Protection Agency and the US Department of Agriculture.

At EPA, the administration has ordered that "all contract and grant awards be temporarily suspended, effective immediately," ProPublica writers Andrew Revkin and Jesse Eisinger report, quoting an internal EPA email they obtained. Myron Ebell, the climate change denier who led the Trump team's EPA transition and directs the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, confirmed the suspension, Revkin and Eisenger report.

That's potentially a massive blow to the the agency's core functions, says Patty Lovera, assistant director of the environmental watchdog group Food & Water Watch. "The EPA's not necessarily out there running a bulldozer to clean up a toxic site," she says. Superfund, an EPA program responsible for cleaning up the nation's most contaminated land, is executed through contracts, she said. The EPA turns to contractors for "tons of water stuff, too"—from monitoring water quality downstream from polluters to helping municipalities update water infrastructure to avoid toxins. "It's one thing to put a pause on new contracts to they can be reviewed, but to reach back and stop existing ones is a whole other can of worms," Lovera said.

in Flint, Michigan, where lead contamination has led to the nation's most notorious drinking-water catastrophe in years, the announcement brought uncertainty and confusion. "State officials are seeking more information on a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency freeze on grants and contracts and what it could mean to $100 million in federal funds already appropriated for the Flint water crisis," the news site MLive.com reported Tuesday. In statement quoted by MLive.com, the press secretary for Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder noted that "we haven't received any guidance from the federal government" about EPA's funding to address the Flint crisis.

Read more: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/01/trump-has-already-cracked-down-epa-and-usda

[Girard442]

1. Red Dawn. For real. We are occupied. NT

[GP6971]

4. Where will

FA (Free America) be?

[applegrove]

2. Happened in Canada under Conservative PM Harper. And what a relief

it was when he lost the election. Public servants could relax and go about their business.

[uppityperson]

5. What illegal voters do you mean?

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6. How would they be allowed to vote without being registered

and showing proper identification? You can't just walk into a polling place and vote. Maintenance is done on polling lists - they don't keep people who have moved or died on the list.

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8. They did a recount in Wisconsin

and the difference the second time through didn't amount to a hill of beans. One or two votes not counted for one party, same thing for the other.

Trump is suggesting that there were millions of illegal votes - and they were all for his opponent. There are very, very few cases of voter fraud prosecuted - where one person votes twice or an unregistered person votes. So to suggest that there are millions of cases of voter fraud, all against him, is pretty far fetched. Its evidence of paranoia.