EPA Superfund Work Would End W. 25% Budget Cuts; Pruitt Would Negotiate Himself W. Polluters

[hatrack]

EDIT

It’s no surprise that the White House would recommend harsh EPA cuts, given Trump’s open hostility toward environmental regulations. His initial “skinny budget” for 2017 sought a 30 percent overall cut to the agency, including deep cuts to Superfund and other cleanup programs. Those proposals ultimately didn’t make it into the final 2017 budget approved by Congress, but they’re expected to be mirrored in his 2018 proposal. “Regarding the question as to climate change, I think the President was fairly straightforward—we’re not spending money on that anymore; we consider that to be a waste of your money to go out and do that,” Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s budget director, said in March. “So that is a specific tie to his campaign.”

But Trump’s proposed Superfund cut, specifically, is unexpected in light of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s stated priorities. He has previously said he does not support cutting the Superfund program, and earlier this month he announced a new directive to prioritize it. Also, in recent media appearances, he has been highly critical of the EPA’s direction under President Barack Obama, claiming the previous administration was too focused on climate change at the expense of contaminated sites. This is not true, as I pointed out last week. Moreover, can Pruitt really improve Superfund cleanups if its budget is cut by a quarter?

Superfund cleanup advocates don’t think so. “Funding is, I think, the most significant driver of sites not getting cleaned up,” said Nancy Loeb, director of the Environmental Advocacy Center at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law. An attorney who currently represents the town of DePue, Illinois, the entirety of which is a Superfund site, she said that without proper funding, the EPA can’t clean up contaminated sites itself and force polluters to pay them back. The EPA would be forced to negotiate cleanup deals with polluters from a weaker position, extending the time needed it takes to create an acceptable plan.

The Superfund program is already underfunded. It has been ever since 2003, years after Congress let expire the so-called “Superfund tax” on oil and gas companies, which was able to raise billions for cleanup per year. But now, the Superfund program only operates on about $1 billion per year in federal dollars. “Losing even that minimal amount of funding will essentially bring the program to a halt,” Loeb said. But even in the best-case budget scenario, where the 25 percent cut to Superfund is not realized, Loeb and others worry about Pruitt’s plan for the sites. That’s because Pruitt, who has a history of close and friendly ties to polluting industries, has said he will prioritize Superfunds by handling negotiations with polluters himself. According to the EPA’s press release, his directive this month puts “the decision of how to clean up the sites directly into the hands of the Administrator,” rather than other members of the bureaucracy.

EDIT

https://newrepublic.com/article/142813/trumps-epa-set-break-major-promise

[Eugene]

1. Pruitt to negotiate with polluters himself? We've seen this bad movie before.

Have someone fundamentally opposed to environmental protection
put in charge of Superfund cleanup. As if that worked so well
during the Reagan Administration.

[vlyons]

2. Privatize profits, socialize costs

That's right. Let the polluters reap their profits, while in the process contaminating and trashing the environment. Let the taxpayers clean up the mess via the EPA superfund.