There have been countless jokes about Donald Trump’s aversion to academic work, with many comparing the US president to an infant. The Daily Show created a browser extension aptly named “Make Trump Tweets Eight Again” that converts the font of Potus’s tweets to crayon scrawlings. Indeed, it is absurd that – even without the childish font – one particular bill that was introduced within the first month of Trump taking office looked just as puerile. Proposed by Matt Gaetz, a Republican who had been in Congress for barely a month, “HR 861” was only one sentence long:
“The Environmental Protection Agency shall terminate on December 31, 2018”.
If this seems like a stunt, that is because Gaetz is unlikely actually to achieve his stated aim. Drafting such a short bill without any co-sponsors – and leaving it to a novice congressman to present – is hardly the best strategy to ensure a bill will pass.
@musiclover764 @RepublicOfKek Why, what has the EPA done to deserve termination? Besides being the villains in the Simpsons Movie
— Kyno50 (@MineKynoMine) 7 February 2017
Still, Republicans’ distrust for environmental protections is well known – the long-running cartoon show The Simpsons even did a send up of the EPA where the agency had its own private army. So what else makes HR 861 implausible?
Well, the ten-word-long statement neglects to address the fact that many federal environmental laws assume the existence of or defer to the EPA. In the event that the EPA was abolished, all of these laws – from the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 to the Frank R Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act of 2016 – would need to be amended. Preferably, a way of doing this would be included in the bill itself.
Additionally, for the bill to be accepted in the Senate there would have to be eight Democratic senators who agreed with its premise. This is an awkward demand, when not even all Republicans back Trump. The man Trump appointed to the helm of the EPA, Scott Pruitt, is particularly divisive because of his long opposition to the agency. Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine said that she was hostile to the appointment of a man who was “so manifestly opposed to the mission of the agency” that he had sued the EPA 14 times. Polls from 2016 and 2017 suggest that most Americans would also be opposed to the agency’s termination.
I assume that the guy that was head of the EPA in the Simpsons movie has been re-hired to fill the position by Trump.
— Andrew Eddy (@AEddy6087) 10 March 2017
But if Trump is incapable of entirely eliminating the EPA, he has other ways of rendering it futile. In January, Potus banned the EPA and National Park Services from “providing updates on social media or to reporters”, leading to a slew of angry alternative environmental agency Twitter accounts. Some, like “Angry National Park”, are still acting as political aggregates – fighting the new administration’s agenda by disseminating information on both national and grassroots movements in short, snappy bursts. This Friday Trump plans to “switch off” the government’s largest citizen-linked data site – the EPA’s Open Data Web Service. This is vital not just for storing and displaying information on climate change, but also as an accessible way of civilians viewing details of local environmental changes, such as chemical spills. Given the administration’s recent announcement of his intention to repeal existing safeguards, such as those to stabilise the climate and protect the environment, defunding this public data tool is possibly an attempt to decrease awareness of Trump’s forthcoming actions.
There was also a recent update to the web page of the EPAs Office of Science and Technology, in which all references to “science-based” work were removed in favour of an emphasis on “national economically and technologically achievable standards”.
Trump’s reshuffle of the EPA’s priorities puts the onus on economic activity at the expense of public health and environmental safety. Pruitt, who is also eager to #MakeAmericaGreatAgain, spoke in an interview of his desire to “exit” the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. He came to this conclusion because of his belief that the agreement means “contracting our economy to serve and really satisfy Europe, and China, and India”.
didn’t the simpsons movie predict that the leader of the EPA would destroy us
— cyberpunk hellokitty (@traceyfanclub) 9 March 2017
Rather than outright closure of the EPA, its influence and funding are being leached away. HR 861 might be a subtle version of one of Potus’s Twitter taunts – empty and outrageous – but it is by no means the only way to drastically alter the EPA’s landscape. With Pruitt as EPA administrator, the organisation may become a caricature of itself – as in The Simpsons Movie. Let us hope that the #resistance movements started by “Rogue” EPA and “Alt” National Parks social media accounts are able to stave off the vultures until there is “Hope” once more.
Content from our partners
Related
