Let’s just pretend and it’ll all go away!
Scott Pruitt’s EPA and the White House sought to block publication of a federal health study on a nationwide water-contamination crisis, after one Trump administration aide warned it would cause a “public relations nightmare,” newly disclosed emails reveal.
The intervention early this year — not previously disclosed — came as HHS’ Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry was preparing to publish its assessment of a class of toxic chemicals that has contaminated water supplies near military bases, chemical plants and other sites from New York to Michigan to West Virginia.
The study would show that the chemicals endanger human health at a far lower level than EPA has previously called safe, according to the emails.
“The public, media, and Congressional reaction to these numbers is going to be huge,” one unidentified White House aide said in an email forwarded on Jan. 30 by James Herz, a political appointee who oversees environmental issues at the OMB. The email added: “The impact to EPA and [the Defense Department] is going to be extremely painful. We (DoD and EPA) cannot seem to get ATSDR to realize the potential public relations nightmare this is going to be.”
Pruitt is also hard at work trying to change the orientation of the 48 year old Clean Air Act.
Pruitt wants a cost/benefit analysis included in every decision that the EPA makes.
Pruitt intends to put the EPA in the position of being allowed to refuse to clean up an environmental disaster because it would be too expensive for industry and/or the government to undertake.
Presumably the clean-up in the Gulf of Mexico would not have been allowed because of the cost. Or the Exxon Valdez oil clean-up in Alaska.
The US Supreme Court ruled long ago that “public health” and “not cost” should be the only focus of the EPA.
So what Pruitt is actually trying to do is to get rid of the EPA and allow corporations to destroy our environment at will.
Republicans are the enemy.