This article was originally published by New Republic, and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Right now in America, there are more than 1,300 large swaths of land and water where toxic stews of chemicals like asbestos, mercury, PCBs and arsenic linger, threatening the health of tens of thousands of humans. They’re called Superfund sites, some of the country’s most contaminated places—and on Tuesday, President Donald Trump reportedly will propose cutting the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund budget by 25 percent. According to The New York Times, his fiscal 2018 budget proposal will also call for a 36 percent cut to a separate program for cleaning up contaminated former industrial sites.
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 former 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.
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