The E.P.A.’s Dangerous Anti-Regulatory Policies
This week, while attention was focussed on the Senate’s health-care bill, the Trump Administration continued to quietly do the one thing it does well: wreak havoc on the environment. On Tuesday, the Environmental Protection Agency released its plan to rescind the Clean Water Rule, also known as the Waters of the United States rule, or WOTUS. WOTUS essentially represents the Obama Administration’s attempt to clarify which waterways are governed by the Clean Water Act. A memo that the E.P.A. issued when the rule was put in place, in 2015, notes that it protects streams that roughly one in three Americans depend on for drinking water. (This memo is not currently available on the E.P.A.’s Web site; to find it, you have to go to the archived site.)
You might think that the well-being of a third of the population—some hundred and seventeen million people—would be of significance to the E.P.A., but then you might also think that the agency is there to protect the environment. The Trump Administration thinks otherwise. In announcing the proposal, the E.P.A. administrator, Scott Pruitt, didn’t even bother to pretend that he was interested in public safety. Instead, he said, the agency’s goal was to “provide regulatory certainty to the nation’s farmers and businesses.”
Meanwhile, also on Tuesday, the Associated Press reported that Pruitt had met privately with the head of Dow Chemical, Andrew Liveris, during a conference in Houston, shortly before reversing an Obama Administration decision to ban the pesticide chlorpyrifos for use on food crops. (An E.P.A. spokeswoman said that the two men “did not discuss chlorpyrifos.”)
Chlorpyrifos is a neurotoxin that has been shown to be especially dangerous to infants and young children, and a review by E.P.A. scientists had led the agency to recommend that it be disallowed. Somewhere between five and ten million pounds of the pesticide, most of it produced by Dow AgroSciences, are applied to crops in the United States every year. (The company said that “authorized uses of chlorpyrifos products offer wide margins of protections for human health and safety.”) Liveris, meanwhile, heads a White House manufacturing council, and his company, according to the Washington Post, “wrote a $1 million check to help underwrite Trump’s inaugural festivities.” In announcing that the E.P.A. would not ban chlorpyrifos, Pruitt once again passed over the well-being of the public. The decision, he said, when he announced it in March, was made out of a “need to provide regulatory certainty.”
Of course, if the Trump Administration was really interested in “regulatory certainty,” the rational thing to have done would have been to keep the Obama-era rules in place. WOTUS had already been finalized. The proposed change will take years to wend its way through the rule-making process—we can only hope more years than the Trump Administration has left. Similarly, the Administration’s decision to reverse course on chlorpyrifos will result in more uncertainty, rather than less. Already, seven states have filed legal objections in an effort to force the agency to follow through on the recommendations of its own scientists. (The coalition is led by New York’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, who, in announcing the challenge, noted that the E.P.A.’s job is to insure “the health and safety of New Yorkers and all Americans—especially our children.”)
What the Administration is really interested in, it seems, isn’t “regulatory certainty” but, rather, regulatory laxity. Trump loves to rail against “job-killing regulations.” Just last week, he boasted that the White House had formed a task force inside every agency to find and eliminate “job-killing regulations, of which we’ve had many.” But, as with so many Trumpian claims, the number of times this phrase has been repeated is inversely related to its truthfulness. There is, in fact, little evidence that regulations kill jobs. According to a 2014 review of studies on the subject, conducted by researchers at the London School of Economics, environmental regulations seem to have a “statistically insignificant” effect on employment. A 2015 report by the Office of Management and Budget (which has also been taken down from the Web site) notes that sometimes regulations may appear to cost jobs, if, say, a plant closes down, and other times they may appear to create jobs, as when a company staffs up to comply with the new rules. Over the long term, however, these “apparent reductions or increases in employment will often . . . turn out to be shifts in employment” rather than net gains or losses. The report calculates that the “monetized benefits” of federal regulations enacted during the previous decade were “significantly higher than the monetized costs.”
Which brings us to what is most horrifying about what’s going on. If you ignore the benefits of regulation, it’s easy to argue they are outweighed by the costs. But you don’t need a great deal of sophisticated math to conclude that the benefits of maintaining safe drinking water and avoiding developmental problems in kids are pretty high—higher than just about any conceivable estimate of the price. In a letter to Pruitt, the American Academy of Pediatrics stated that its members are “deeply alarmed that the EPA’s decision to allow the continued use of chlorpyrifos contradicts the agency’s own science and puts developing fetuses, infants, children, and pregnant women at risk.”
A gruesome monument to the dangers of deregulation now stands in the middle of London. Grenfell Tower, the North Kensington apartment building that went up in flames earlier this month, was clad in materials that, British authorities had repeatedly been warned, were unsafe for tall buildings. But the government, apparently believing its own anti-regulatory rhetoric, resisted calls for stricter rules. Trump is scheduled to go Warsaw, Hamburg, and Paris next month. Perhaps he should visit London as well.
