The Trump administration’s gutting of agencies protecting the environment, monitoring pollution and overseeing climate change mitigation makes a travesty of Earth Day on its 55th anniversary.
Every day, another executive order, staff cut or funding cut is announced that undoes decades of regulatory actions. These directives are rolling back efforts to mitigate climate change and protect the environment — and, by definition, American health and well-being.
President Trump, upon taking office on Jan. 20, announced his intention to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, just as he did during his first administration, but with more dire consequences.
The list of Trump’s environmental sins is egregious. For instance, in one week in early March alone, his administration:
- Announced it is firing an additional 1,000 employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, after previously dismissing some 1,300 staff from the agency, including those at the National Weather Service. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is critical for monitoring and warning about threats like hurricanes. Staffing cuts will negatively affect 122 weather offices around the country that monitor the weather and issue warnings about severe weather events, which have increased significantly under climate change.
- Pledged to reverse the Biden administration’s focus on climate change — because, as Energy Secretary Chris Wright put it, that’s “a very poor direction in energy policy” (although earlier this week, a judge reinstated them.)
- Canceled $20 billion climate grants, going to eight nonprofits through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
- Said all Environmental Protection Agency offices would be eliminated.
- Suspended 20 legal opinions that included protection for wild birds.
Other destruction of environmental protections and climate change mitigation efforts include, but are not limited to:
- Signing several executive orders to revive the country’s coal industry.
- Slashing funding and staff for the National Climate Assessment, which the federal government produces every four years to analyze the effects of rising temperatures on human health, agriculture, energy production, water resources, etc.
- Cutting almost $4 million in funding for climate research at Princeton University.
- Repealing the Biden-era limit on water flow in showerheads.
- Moving to end Environmental Protection Agency requirements that big polluters must disclose how much carbon dioxide and other planet-warming gases they emit.
- Cutting 84 percent of the staff that funds recovery from disasters as part of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The administration recently ordered a stop to construction of a major offshore wind project that would power more than 500,00 New York homes. It plans to eliminate habitat protections for endangered and threatened species, allowing logging, mining and other development that would lead to their extinction.
Even Trump policies such as the deportation of immigrants have environmental consequences. Bees, upon which our agriculture depends, continue to disappear. And beekeepers depend on immigrant labor.
While greed and indifference to the environment are significant factors in this anti-environment onslaught, the Trump administration’s war on our Earth is blessed by Christian nationalists. Evangelicals are most apt to deny climate change while “Nones” are most likely to accept it and want to combat it.
The White House’s approach toward the environment offers little to celebrate this Earth Day.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to promoting the constitutional principle of separation between state and church and educating the public on matters of nontheism. With nearly 42,000 members, FFRF advocates for freethinkers’ rights. For more information, visit ffrf.org.
