Trump Attacks The EPA

Lee Zeldin, current EPA administrator under the Trump administration

The Trump regime and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin are recklessly rolling back 31 of the EPA’s critical clean air and water regulations. This is a move that represents an egregious assault on public health and disproportionately endangers the health and well being of working class and vulnerable communities in the US. The regulations now being rescinded limited emissions of harmful air pollutants, reduced emissions of air pollutants contributing to the climate crisis and prevented water contamination. These regulations served to protect millions from the worst impacts of the climate crisis, life threatening chronic illness, and life-threatening diseases.  Rescinding these basic projections is a blatant prioritization of corporatist bourgeois interests over human lives.

Now, for every million dollars in favors handed to corporate polluters, the American public will suffer an estimated $6 million in health-related costs, including increased rates of asthma, cancer, heart disease and respiratory illnesses. The changes to air pollution standards alone threatens over 200,000 lives and will contribute to more than 100 million preventable asthma attacks between now and 2050.

The environmental rollbacks will further exacerbate existing health inequities in the US. The rollbacks will accelerate environmental degradation at a critical juncture of the ongoing climate crisis as severe weather extremes are becoming increasingly frequent and increasingly devastating for both the US and for countries across the Global South.

The EPA was originally established to protect human health and the environment. Zeldin has abandoned that mission and has re-framed the EPA to support and promote the increased use of fossil fuels and accelerated environmental deregulation. Zeldin and his cronies are prioritizing multinational fossil fuel interests at the direct expense of the health and welfare of the working class.

The rollbacks are also specifically targeting EPA programs established to address environmental justice and climate resilience. All funding of programs in those areas has been curtailed, and all EPA staff working specifically on environmental justice have been removed from their positions and placed on temporary leave while action is pending to permanently fire them from the agency. Zeldin is also implementing changes at the EPA to eliminate all research staff within the EPA’s Office of Research and Development, including 800 research scientists and support staff at the EPA facility in Clifton.

The increased pollution resulting from rescinding environmental standards and from the curtailment of key EPA programs will exacerbate the disproportionate environmental burdens faced by the working class, especially the working poor and people of color who have been historically redlined into living in neighborhoods with higher exposure to air and water pollution. The erosion of these protections and standards will reverse decades of hard-fought advancements in environmental health that have been central to improving the health of the working class.