Trump’s New Budget Would Eliminate Nearly All EPA Climate Change Programs

By Zoya Teirstein, Grist

14 February 18

he White House sent a $4.4 trillion budget blueprint to Congress on Monday, but the odds of it passing in its current form are slim to none.

That’s good, because 14 climate change partnerships and research programs are on the chopping block. “An American Budget” would trim the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget by 34 percent, or $2.8 billion, and slash the Office of Science and Technology’s spending in half.

One of the programs barely spared was the Hazardous Substance Superfund Account, which cleans up some of the most polluted sites in the U.S. The new budget had proposed cutting the program’s funding by more than 30 percent, but a last-minute addendum restored that $327 million.

The EPA’s Superfund spending is about half of what it was 30 years ago, and 1,343 high priority sites are awaiting cleanup. Who knows how bad things would be if EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt hadn’t made the Superfund program a cornerstone of his agenda.