BY KASIA KOVACS
The Environmental Protection Agency has already braced itself for $2 billion in budget cuts and a loss of 3,000 employees. But more painful cuts may be coming, Axios reported Wednesday afternoon, as President Donald Trump’s administration was discussing possible further reductions to the EPA.
“They [the EPA career employees] just have to deal with it, because this was coming,” an anonymous source told Axios.
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On the campaign trail last year, Trump spoke about streamlining government by cutting as much of the budgets for federal agencies as possible. And since taking office, Trump has seemed to focus his efforts on EPA as a sort of testing ground — hit it hard and use it as a case study on slashing regulations and budgets for other federal agencies.
The decision to focus on the EPA was no accident, either. Trump is a vocal climate change skeptic, once tweeting that climate change was a hoax invented by the Chinese, despite the fact that the vast majority of scientists believe climate change to be a real and worrying phenomenon.
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“We are going to get rid of (the EPA) in almost every form,” Trump said at a Republican primary debate last March. “We’re going to have little tidbits left, but we’re going to take a tremendous amount out.”