BGA confirms Trump EPA cut staff, investigations
Region 5 Great Lakes inspections have plummeted 60 percent under President Trump
EPA union leader Nicole Cantello decries staffing cuts at the agency at a July protest in Chicago with U.S. Reps. Jan Schakowsky and Danny Davis. (One Illinois/Ted Cox)
By Ted Cox
The Better Government Association is out with a study that confirms President Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency has cut staff and the number of investigations in order to ease the way for big-business polluters.
The BGA published a new study Friday charging that, under President Trump, EPA probes have declined nationally, but especially in the Great Lakes area under the agency’s Region 5 based in Chicago and comprising Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. According to the BGA: “Inspections under Trump out of the Chicago office have plummeted by more than 60 percent, while inspections throughout the rest of the nation dropped by 30 percent.”
BGA data show that EPA investigations have been on a steady decline since 2010, but that has accelerated under President Trump. EPA probes dropped from about 17,000 in 2010 to just under 12,000 in 2016, and now 8,000 thus far in 2019. During that time span, investigations out of the Region 5 office actually rose to more than 4,000 in 2012 and 2013, but dipped under 2,000 in 2017 under Trump and now stand at about half that this year.
The BGA also noted, “Since Trump took office, there are about 150 fewer scientists, technicians, and other employees in the Chicago-based EPA offices of Region 5.”
That confirmed figures released earlier this year by Felicia Chase, vice president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 704, which represents 900 EPA employees across the Midwest. “The Chicago office is short 120 scientists and engineers,” she said at a Chicago protest in April. Calling the proposed cuts “devastating” and adding that agency staffing amounts to “a mere skeleton crew,” Chase said, “The EPA can no longer effectively protect the Great Lakes and other great water bodies, such as the Ohio River,” adding, “The health of the air that we breathe and the water that we rely on in our communities are at great risk.”
The BGA quoted AFGE Local 704 President Nicole Cantello as saying, “This administration has been relentlessly attacking the employees who protect human health and the environment since January 2017. Science and fact no longer rule here.”
The BGA specifically zoomed in on the Veolia North America waste-incineration plant in Sauget near East St. Louis. According to the BGA, in the last days before President Obama left office, the EPA “ordered the stacks continuously monitored for arsenic, lead, mercury, and other harmful metals.” But, almost immediately after Trump’s inauguration, the plant manager and former Congressman Jerry Costello, a Belleville Democrat, lobbied now-disgraced former Trump EPA head Scott Pruitt for relief on the monitoring.
“Ultimately, the Trump EPA issued a ‘final revised’ permit in June this year that eliminated the previously mandated monitoring guidelines for the plant,” the BGA reported. “That ruling in Sauget is just one in a string of decisions by the Trump administration to reduce staff and relax or reverse regulation and policies throughout the Midwest.”
It added that Cathy Stepp, appointed by Trump to head Region 5, “declined numerous requests for interviews for this report. A spokeswoman for her office said the EPA has become more dependent on ‘state assists’ and a reinvigorated self-audit program.”
Stepp has previously tangled with U.S. Sens. Tammy Duckworth and Dick Durbin. Duckworth charged earlier this year that “EPA Regional Administrator Cathy Stepp and other political appointees are working to undermine” the agency’s work policing polluters. Durbin soon joined Duckworth in charging that Stepp was behind the EPA falling to adequately test and monitor firms using ethylene oxide in sterilization, specifically the since-shuttered Sterigenics company in Willowbrook.