Environmental Protection Agency officials are “leaving in droves”, reports the New York Times.
More than 700 people have left the Environmental Protection Agency since President Trump took office, a wave of departures that puts the administration nearly a quarter of the way toward its goal of shrinking the agency to levels last seen during the Reagan administration.
What marvellous news to ease us all into the festive Christmas spirit, eh readers?
Why, it’s like the final scene in A Christmas Carol where Scrooge repents of all his miserliness, his nephew Fred gets a big fat turkey, Bob Cratchit gets a pay rise and Tiny Tim declares “God bless us, every one!”
Not, of course, that this is quite the way the New York Times sees it. It wants us to believe that this is an attack on both science and the environment.
Within the agency, science in particular is taking a hard hit. More than 27 percent of those who left this year were scientists, including 34 biologists and microbiologists; 19 chemists; 81 environmental engineers and environmental scientists; and more than a dozen toxicologists, life scientists and geologists. Employees say the exodus has left the agency depleted of decades of knowledge about protecting the nation’s air and water. Many also said they saw the departures as part of a more worrisome trend of muting government scientists, cutting research budgets and making it more difficult for academic scientists to serve on advisory boards.
Actually, though, what it really is is #winning.
EPA administrator Scott Pruitt is achieving what President Trump appointed him to do. He is draining the swamp.
As I’ve argued before, the EPA has always had less to do with protecting the environment – Colorado gold mine, anyone? – than it does with killing business.
Essentially, it is a communist sleeper cell introduced to the heart of the U.S. government system by Richard Nixon in the mistaken belief that paying Danegeld to your enemies will make them leave you alone.
Previous Republican presidents – such as the Bushes – were far too squishy to dare reform it.
Democrat presidents, most notably Obama, used it as a way of bypassing Congress and imposing on the U.S. a United-Nations-driven globalist agenda almost entirely inimical to the interests of American citizens.
The most egregious example of this was the EPA’s Endangerment Finding, which declared carbon dioxide – and various other harmless trace gases – to be a threat to “the public health and welfare of current and future generations.”
This was a political decision, not a scientific one, forced through by Obama’s hatchetwoman Lisa Jackson.
