Posted on 01/27/2017 8:36:57 AM PST by rktman
The former leader of President Donald Trump’s EPA transition team said Thursday he expects the president to slash the agency’s budget and staff.
Myron Ebell, the director of the Center for Energy at free market group Competitive Enterprise Institute, told reporters that Trump is considering reducing by magnitudes the agency’s workforce. It currently stands at 15,000 employees nationwide.
“Let’s aim for half and see how it works out, and then maybe we’ll want to go further,” Ebell said, referring to his wish to see the EPA slashed by at least half. He left Trump’s transition team last week, but was at one time on the president’s short list to head the agency.
Half of the EPA’s budget is transferred to state and local areas to update infrastructure projects and environmental cleanup efforts. Ebell, who is a long-time EPA critic and climate skeptic, said the cuts would likely fall on the remaining half of the agency’s budget, which supports a portion of federal employees.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailycaller.com ...
Save the liver.
I agree with you about pollution back then, and yes, they did make a difference, but an open-ended in-perpetuity all powerful agency that for all intents and purposes makes its own laws is not a good thing.
The major impediment to erasing EPA would be in contracts for which it has obligated the United States. The FIRST action should be the cancellation of EVERY existing contract and purchase order contract it has. EVERY contract the US government lets has the clause that stipulates it can be cancelled at any time for convenience of the government (absent shutdown costs, sunk costs and on-the-books commitments).
Shut it the eff down completely!
Start by transferring members of EPA’s SWAT team to ICE or CBP.
The half remaining employed should be permanently assigned to Counting Blades of grass all day everyday.
they are the biggest brake on economic growth in the country.
I agree. If it had stuck to the original purpose, stopping gross pollution, it would be fine. But now it has morphed into an radical environmentalist organization with the full power of the federal government behind it trying to govern every aspect of our lives.
The truth is when Nixon signed it pollution was out of control. The Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act were successful in eliminating most of the pollution. But to justify their existence they had to make up new problems to solve like declaring CO2 a pollutant.
I think the EPA accomplished the desired effect initially but ran out of legitimate reasons for their existence.
This is the bane of government.
Organs of internal security cannot exist without
an internal threat hence the need to manufacture one
to justify their existance.
Government trades “security” at the cost of “freedom”.
Take it and a lot more shares from the Beltway Bandit law firms and consultants who manage the EPA cleanup projects. They have been leeches on the economy long enough.
The cuts should be applied dollar to dollar to clean up the Animus River debacle they created in 2015. In their zeal to get a certain area with abandoned gold mines declared a superfund site, Contractors under guidance of EPA punched a hole in a restraining dam allowing millions of gallons of water mixed with mine tailings to contaminate the Animus River Basin. Fines and punitive damages for this debacle if a private company was at fault are in excess of 8bn and counting. EPA should have this tab taken out of their budget
Good. Darned good, Mr. President.
for a nano second, just for a nano second I envisioned the same thing.
;>)
Works for me.
In my opinion, the EPA needs to be shut down entirely, and its staff let go. Same with the ATF, except maybe let agents transfer to other federal law enforcement jobs on a case by blcase basis. The politicized nature of the work these two agencies do renders them a liability to freedom.
[“Let’s aim for half and see how it works out, and then maybe we’ll want to go further,”]
KEEP MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! (Thinking ahead)
That will slow them down, obviously.
But really need to cut EPA regs.
I’d like to see cheap lightbulbs again as well as being able to use more than 1.6 gallons in a toilet, on the minor side.
They also come up w/chemicals to regulate/ban on a daily basis. I find it hard to believe it is all as dangerous as they claim. They have a paganist “organic” agenda and pretty much want to ban anything man made.
Spot-check their lab work and that of their contractors. Probably a lot is paid for fake reports.
Cut that HOV BS too while you’re at it, or is that another dept?
Absolutely right. Much like the IRS under klinton. He used it as his personal enforcer against evangelical churches that had the temerity to criticize him.
My thought on the EPA is that nothing useful has come out of that agency since 1990. Rules should be rolled back to that time, maybe even earlier. If there are any legitimate concerns that have been addressed since then, then the science must be shown and proven to be true. Not fake science like global warming, but real facts that back up assertions.
Well said and exactly right.
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