COTW: Draining the Swamp

Hair Further is not the first Repugnant president to come to Washington with a vow to "drain the swamp" on his lips.  By this phrase, laissez-faire proponents mean to cripple federal agencies by reducing their budgets and passing legislation emasculating their regulatory authority.  A case in point is what has happened to the Environmental Protection Agency. Basically a law enforcement agency, it has suffered a thirty percent budget cut.  It's budget is about the size it was in the 70's adjusted for inflation. [chart below] Imagine if the Pentagon were forced to accept a 30% cut in spending!  EPA is being hollowed out by reducing staff and leaving senior level jobs unfilled, or worse filled with industry shills. These charts tell the story:

Congress is set to appropriate $60 billion to buy out EPA staff, whose positions are to be eliminated.  Environmental law enforcement has become lax as a result.  Superfund enforcement responsible for cleaning up the nation's most severe pollution sites has fallen by 37%.  Some programs have been completely eliminated such as radon removal from schools, controlling contaminated run-off from roads and certification of lead removal contractors.  The agency under Scott Pruitt, the secret friend of industry,  has eliminated regulations that

• Verified emissions from a company’s industrial expansion;
• Blocked a potentially disastrous mining operation in Alaska’s Bristol Bay;
• Required the tracking of methane emissions (overturned by the S. Court);  
• Required data collection of emissions from oil and gas companies;
• Monitored fracking;
• Required companies to disclose hazardous chemicals they’re storing;
• Protected tributaries of sensitive bodies of water;
• Set tighter emissions standards for trucks;
• Banned the toxic pesticide chlorpyrifos;
• The most egregious rollback--recommended the total repeal of the Clean     Power Plan

This administration anti-Earth, anti-science policies is epitomized by its decision to renege on the most significant achievement in history of anthropomorphic climate change--The Paris Accords.  References to climate change have been removed from the agency's website, and entire offices addressing the problem have been shut.  Pruitt has even created a blacklist of EPA employees who had worked or published on the issue.  "Draining the swamp" is actually coded language for selling out the country to the hugest corporate bidders while raking in the monetary rewards for themselves*.

*Scott Pruitt Pruitt before he resigned as administrator retained his own round-the-clock security detail, costing taxpayers $830,000. No EPA administrator has ever done that. He also installed a secure phone booth in his own office for $33,000, and special locks that cost $6,000. He spent at least $12,000 for flights around the country between March and May (each of which included a leg in Tulsa), $58,000 on chartered and military flights over the summer, and nearly $40,000 on a trip to Morocco to promote natural gas exports. His frequent first-class trips with his security detail have added more than $200,000 to that tally. He also issued a $120,000 no-bid contract to a Republican opposition research firm to target and track journalists critical of his tenure.