Thread: Trump Hopes to Slash EPA Staff, Carbon Footprint by 50%

Trump Hopes to Slash EPA Staff, Carbon Footprint by 50%

@jonathanvswan/Twitter

by SEAN MORAN
27 Jan 2017

President Trump hopes to cut the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) 15,000 person staff by at least half, says Myron Ebell, Trump’s former head of the EPA transition team.

According to the Washington Examiner:

“Let’s aim for half and see how it works out, and then maybe we’ll want to go further,” Myron Ebell said now that he has returned to his position as director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Other reports say Ebell wants the staffing level to be on par with that 45 years ago when the EPA was started during the administration of former Republican President Richard Nixon. That would mean as few as 5,000 employees would remain.

“President Trump said during the campaign that he would like to abolish the EPA, or ‘leave a little bit,'” Ebell said. “I think the administration is likely to start proposing cuts to the 15,000 staff, because the fact is that a huge amount of the work of the EPA is actually done by state agencies. It’s not clear why so many employees are needed at the federal level.”

Trump has nominated Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma’s attorney general to serve as his EPA Director. Pruitt has been a voracious opponent of environmental regulations and has promised to dismantle Obama-era EPA regulations, including the Clean Power Plan.

To aid worried EPA staffers, the agency will offer counseling:

Jonathan Swan
✔@jonathanvswan

A source inside the EPA took a quick picture of counseling sessions being advertised at the agency as @realDonaldTrump takes over.
2:02 PM - 27 Jan 2017

The advertised seminar, entitled “Feeling Pressured? Worried About Change at EPA?”, appears to consists of a 45 minute session on how to deal with change and how to “stop yourself from getting hurt and/or angry”. EPA Spokeswoman Enersta Jones told Axios that the agency has frequent training seminars and that “This is just one of the more recent ones that were offered.”

http://www.breitbart.com/big-governm...otprint-by-50/

ECONOMY
COMMENTARY
Why Did the Environmental Protection Agency Spend $1.4 Million on Guns?

Ed Feulner / @EdFeulner /

October 30, 2015 / comments

Open the Books found that the agency has spent millions of dollars over the last decade on guns, ammo, body armor, camouflage equipment, unmanned aircraft, amphibious assault ships, radar and night-vision gear, and other military-style weaponry and surveillance activities.(Photo: Skyhobo/iStock)

COMMENTARY BY

Ed Feulner@EdFeulner
Edwin J. Feulner’s 36 years of leadership as president of The Heritage Foundation transformed the think tank from a small policy shop into America’s powerhouse of conservative ideas. Read his research.


Even those of us who have worked in Washington for many years and become accustomed to the inner workings of government can still be amazed by what lurks behind the curtain sometimes. Case in point: the Environmental Protection Agency.

Most Americans have at least heard of the EPA, even if they have only a dim notion of what the agency actually does. It tends to skate along under the radar, unless something unusual happens, such as the toxic spill that turned the Colorado’s Animas River orange last August. Of course, what really made the spill unusual is that the EPA itself caused it.

Otherwise, Americans don’t hear much about the agency. So many of them would probably be as unpleasantly surprised as I was by a new report by Open the Books, a nonprofit group that promotes government transparency. Its look into the EPA’s spending habits is alarming, to put it mildly.

The first thing that strikes you is the EPA’s spendthrift ways. Even if times were flush and government coffers were overflowing (which is far from the case), the agency spends money like it’s expecting the Second Coming next week. The Open the Books audit covered tens of thousands of checks the EPA wrote from 2000 to 2014, with hundreds of millions going toward such things as luxury furnishings, sports equipment, and “environmental justice” grants to raise awareness of global warming.

The second thing that hits you is where the rest of the money goes. The headline of an op-ed by economist Stephen Moore in Investor’s Business Daily sums it up well: “Why Does the EPA Need Guns, Ammo, and Armor to Protect the Environment?”

And not just a few weapons. Open the Books found that the agency has spent millions of dollars over the last decade on guns, ammo, body armor, camouflage equipment, unmanned aircraft, amphibious assault ships, radar and night-vision gear, and other military-style weaponry and surveillance activities.

“We were shocked ourselves to find these kinds of pervasive expenditures at an agency that is supposed to be involved in clean air and clean water,” said Open the Books founder Adam Andrzejewski. “Some of these weapons are for full-scale military operations.”

Among the EPA’s purchases:

• $1.4 million for “guns up to 300mm.”
• $380,000 for “ammunition.”
• $210,000 for “camouflage and other deceptive equipment.”
• $208,000 for “radar and night-vision equipment.”
• $31,000 for “armament training devices.”

The list goes on. It’s filled with the kind of equipment you’d expect to be purchased by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, not an agency ostensibly designed to protect the environment.

But as it turns out, armed, commando-style raids by the EPA are not unheard of. One such raid occurred in 2013, in a small Alaskan town where armed agents in full body armor reportedly confronted local miners accused of polluting local waters. Perhaps the agency is gearing up for more operations like that one?

If so, the EPA wouldn’t be all that unique. According to the Justice Department, there are now 40 federal agencies with more than 100,000 officers authorized to carry guns and make arrests. They include the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The EPA audit underscores the need for serious budget cuts at the agency. In July, before the Colorado spill and the Open the Books report, environmental policy expert Nicolas Loris called on Congress to shrink the EPA’s budget, outlining several specific cuts that could be done immediately and with no detrimental effect on the environment.
“The proposed cuts outlined here merely scratch the surface of a rogue agency that has wildly spent and regulated outside its purview,” Loris concluded. After reviewing the Open the Books report, who can disagree?

Originally published in The Washington Times.
http://dailysignal.com/2015/10/30/wh...llion-on-guns/

This is very true. There needs to be a federal EPA, no doubt about it, however, the bulk of the actual real work is done by companies and property owners, the evaluations and clean-up approvals are done by states on the vast majority of projects, so I'm not sure what these 15,000 people are doing. Probably spending a lot of time on climate change, global warming, fossil fuels, and other things that don't involve actual regulation and clean-up of the environment. Not sure what's going on. It didn't used to be this way, so whatever is wrong there needs to be fixed and more authority including final authority needs to be given to states.

The EPA does not need and "army". Those assets should be transferred to DOD immediately.

Wow, this gun thing is very disturbing. Are they suggesting they need to be armed against companies and property owners or to protect themselves from grizzlies in environmental wilderness? Unheard of!! Geez. Oh lord yes, cut that agency down to barebones to do the necessities of regulating and working with the states.

The just war on the EPA

The EPA and its counterparts need reining, a measure that’s long overdue


Illustration on curbing the EPA by Alexander Hunter/The Washington Times more >

By Kelly Riddell - The Washington Times - Thursday, January 26, 2017

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

The mainstream media is in panic mode.

“Hour by hour — shock decree by shock decree — a once great nation is being diminished by self-inflicted blows beyond its enemies’ wildest dreams,” Philip Gourevitch, a staff writer at The New Yorker, penned on Twitter in response to the news that the Trump administration is mandating Environmental Protection Agency scientific studies and data undergo review by political staff before public release.

EPA staffers — who reportedly cried and had to take days off for counseling after Donald Trump won the presidency in November — are in full revolt. After the Trump administration took away their social media accounts and froze their grants, a rogue staffer at the National Park Service tweeted out climate facts.

And yet, the EPA and its environmental counterparts within the federal bureaucracy need reigning in — it’s a measure that’s long overdue.

Tasked with unilaterally carrying out former President Barack Obama’s climate change policies by decree — because such legislation would’ve never made it through Congress — has emboldened many career bureaucrats within the EPA to become radical, partisan activists.

They don’t work for the American people, but rather to advance their environmentalism agenda. For some it almost takes on a religious fervor.

Let’s take for example, their use of social media.

In 2015, the Government Accountability Office found the EPA broke the law in order to promote and pass its Clean Water Rule, through a social media fire storm. When the agency submitted the rule for public comment (and therefore criticism), they helped manufacture positive comments — and then used those comments to justify the rule before Congress.

According to a report in The New York Times the “EPA sponsored a drive on Facebook and Twitter to promote its proposed clean water rule in conjunction with the Sierra Club. At the same time, Organizing for Action, a grass-roots group with deep ties to Mr. Obama, was also pushing the rule. They urged the public to flood the agency with positive comments to counter opposition from farming and industry groups.”

The EPA even employed Thunderclap, an innovative social media tool, to help spread its message to hundreds of thousands of people, like a virtual flash mob, the Times reported.

All of this is against the law because federal agencies are prohibited from propagandizing. You see — federal agencies are supposed to be neutral in their rule-making, and let public opinion, industry, scientists and lawmakers derive the best path forward.

But that’s just too democratic for EPA — which under Mr. Obama, always got its way.

Sue and settle also became common practice at the agency in the last eight years. Rather than going through the rule-making process, which can be long and tedious, environmental activists — who were ideological allies with those at the EPA — would sue the agency.

Instead of defending the American taxpayers, the EPA would settle these cases, and in their settlement hash out new regulations. It was an exceptional way to block out the public, business or anyone else who may be affected by the new ruling.

According to a report by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, between 2009 and 2012, the EPA chose not to defend itself in over 60 lawsuits from special interest advocacy groups. Those cases resulted in more than 100 new regulations, including the Clean Power Plan.

In 2015, Mr. Obama’s White House lauded the Clean Power Plan, calling it “the biggest step we’ve ever taken to combat climate change.” And it all started with a coalition of environmental activists suing the EPA.

There’s been numerous other accounts of politics overriding sound policy and even science. The EPA’s decision to veto a copper and gold mine in Alaska before the company had even applied for permits or underwent a scientific evaluation by the Army Corps of Engineers, is one of those.

According to an Inspector General report, EPA ecologist Phillip North colluded with local tribes to stop the project before it ever started. He used his personal email to ask the tribes how to best block the mine, and edited and altered a petition under the Clean Water Act that allowed the tribes to veto the plan. He conveniently left for Australia as to avoid Congressional investigation.

So yeah, there’s partisan problems at the EPA.

Scott Pruitt, Mr. Trump’s pick to lead the agency, knows this all too well. He’s sued the agency 13 times, and understands its culture of executive overreach, lawlessness and environmental activism. That’s why he’s the perfect man for the job.

And that’s why the liberals, and radical left career staffers at the EPA, are freaking out.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...ar-on-the-epa/