Trump Proposes Deep Cuts To EPA, Federal Climate Funding
President Trump’s first budget proposal includes a 31-percent cut to the Environmental Protection Agency as part of an administration effort to slash federal climate change funding. The budget blueprint , released on Thursday, provides $5.7 billion for the EPA, down from $8.3 billion.
Source: Trump Proposes Deep Cuts To EPA, Federal Climate Funding…
Trump’s NASA Budget Cancels Most Of Obama’s Legacy
…Trump Wants To Slash EPA’s Budget To The Lowest Level In 40 Years – Will push for $2.6 billion cut
By MICHAEL BASTASCH
President Donald Trump will recommend cutting the EPA budget 31 percent.
Trump will release his “skinny budget” Thursday morning, broadly laying out the White House’s budget request. Trump will push for a $2.6 billion cut to EPA’s budget, congressional staffers familiar with the request told NYT.
Previous reporting indicated Trump wanted to cut EPA’s budget 25 percent, or $2 billion, and reduce its staff by 20 percent, or 3,000 employees. But in the last couple of days, sources told reporters the cuts would likely be deeper.
Trump is expected to cut dozens of EPA global warming programs, funding to environmental groups and state grants. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said he would push to protect grants to states for environmental cleanup and water infrastructure.…
Doctor groups take up ‘global warming’ advocacy – ‘Will tell the public their health is threatened by’ man-made climate
Bradley J. Fikes Contact Reporter – San Diego Union-Tribune
Under a political advocacy campaign launched Wednesday, a coalition of physician groups will tell the public that their health is threatened by catastrophic man-made global warming, also called climate change. Participating doctors will also urge government action to reduce the damage believed to be caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases.
The campaign is one of a series of actions by political opponents of President Donald Trump, who is skeptical that man-made global warming is dangerous.
Skeptics say climate models have failed to predict the current hiatus in global warming. Global warming believers say that when properly adjusted for accuracy, temperature trends show no hiatus.
The Medical Society Consortium on Climate & Health is led by Dr. Mona Sarfaty, Director of the Program on Climate and Health in the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University.
The consortium said in a press release that it represents more than half of American physicians. Its members include the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, Immunology; American Academy of Family Physicians); American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP); American College of Physicians (ACP); ecoAmerica, and Physicians for Social Responsibility.
On Wednesday, the consortium issued a report titled, “Medical Alert! Climate Change Is Harming Our Health.”
The consortium pointed to a recent study by Abt Associates, a group that works on environmental sustainability and global warming issues. The study said reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the Northeastern states has prevented from 300 to 830 early adult deaths.
“Here’s the message from America’s doctors on climate change: it’s not only happening in the Arctic Circle, it’s happening here,” Sarfaty said in the press release. “It’s not only a problem for us in 2100, it’s a problem now. And it’s not only hurting polar bears, it’s hurting us.”
Sarfaty has made numerous contributions to Democratic candidates, including former president Barack Obama, 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, according to the Federal Election Commission’s website.
However, some consortium supporters are Republicans, including Bob Inglis, executive director of RepublicEN
Report: Trump Commands State Department to Slash $10 Billion UN Funding in Half
The article said the move is “signaling an unprecedented retreat by [the] administration from international operations that keep the peace, provide vaccines for children, monitor rogue nuclear weapons programs, and promote peace talks from Syria to Yemen.”
FP used three unnamed sources for its report, which also called Trump’s directive “draconian measures” taken ahead of the planned release on Thursday of his 2018 federal budget proposal.
The budget “is expected to include cuts of up to 37 percent for spending on the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign assistance programs, including the U.N., in next year’s budget,” according to the report, which went on:
It remains unclear whether the full extent of the steeper U.N. cuts will be reflected in the 2018 budget, which will be prepared by the White House Office of Management and Budget, or whether, as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has proposed, the cuts would be phased in over the coming three years. One official close to the Trump administration said Tillerson has been given flexibility to decide how the cuts would be distributed.
Richard Gowan, a U.N. expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told FP these budget cuts would create “chaos.”
The U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR), for example, received nearly 40 percent of its budget from the United States in 2016. Cutting the U.S. contribution would “leave a gaping hole that other big donors would struggle to fill,” according to Gowan.
The left-leaning FP cites Trump’s intention to cut diplomacy and foreign assistance programs will help him increase the funding for the U.S. military by $54 billion, a “shift” from the Obama administration’s approach to the federal budget.
“State Department officials, for instance, were told that they should try to identify up to $1 billion in cuts in the U.N. peacekeeping budget, according to one source,” FP reported. “The United States provides about $2.5 billion per year to fund peacekeepers.”
Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, cautioned against “slash-and-burn cuts” during her Senate confirmation hearing but is said to be reviewing the U.N.’s 16 peacekeeping missions for possible cuts.
The United States
Cheers! Trump to drop ‘climate change’ from federal environmental reviews
(Reuters) – President Donald Trump is set to sign an order to greatly reduce the role climate change plays in decision making across the U.S. government, Bloomberg reported, citing a person familiar with the administration’s plan.
The order, which could be signed this week, aims to reverse former Democratic President Barack Obama’s broad approach for addressing climate change, the report said. (bloom.bg/2nkDvKo)
The directive will urge the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to undo the Clean Power Plan, the Bloomberg report said.
The Clean Power Plan is Obama’s centerpiece initiative to combat climate change, requiring states to slash emissions of carbon dioxide, but it was never implemented due to legal challenges launched by several Republican states.
According to the report, the measure would direct U.S. regulators to rescind Obama-era regulations limiting oil industry emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
The order will also involve a reconsideration of the government’s use of a metric known as the “social cost of carbon”, which weighs the potential economic damage from climate change, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.
…Bloomberg News: Obama ‘stashed’ $77 billion in ‘climate money’ across agencies to elude budget cuts
Key excerpts: At the National Science Foundation, the geosciences program almost doubled to $1.3 billion.
The budget for NASA’s Earth Science program increased 50 percent, to $1.8 billion.
Feds awarded $1 billion through its Community Development Block Grant program to projects protecting against climate change-related natural disasters.
In 2012, the Federal Highway Administration made climate-adaptation projects eligible for federal aid.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs created the Tribal Climate Resilience Program.
The range of climate programs is vast, stretching across the entire government.
The Congressional Research Service estimated total federal spending on climate was in 2013. It concluded 18 agencies have climate-related activities, and calculated $77 billion in spending from fiscal 2008 through 2013 alone. But that figure could well be too low.
Obama Administration goal was to make ‘programs hard to disentangle’
Obama ‘integrated climate programs into everything the federal government did’
Obama sought to integrate climate programs into everything the federal government did.
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Via:
To Cut Climate Money, First GOP Must Find Where Obama Stashed It
by-
Obama aides spread money across the government to elude cuts
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Most recent estimate puts tab at $77 billion from 2008-2013
President Donald Trump will find the job of reining in spending on climate initiatives made harder by an Obama-era policy of dispersing billions of dollars in programs across dozens of agencies — in part so they couldn’t easily be cut.
There is no single list of those programs or their cost, because President Barack Obama sought to integrate climate programs into everything the federal government did. The goal was to get all agencies to take climate into account, and also make those programs hard to disentangle, according to former members of the administration. In some cases, the idea was to make climate programs hard for Republicans in Congress to even find.
“Much of the effort in the Obama administration was to mainstream climate change,” said Jesse Keenan, who worked on climate issues with the Department of Housing and Urban Development and now teaches at Harvard University. He said all federal agencies were required to incorporate climate-change plans into both their operations.
The Obama administration’s approach will be tested by Trump’s first budget request to Congress, an outline of which is due to be released Thursday. Trump has called climate change a hoax; last November he promised to save $100 billion
Paper: ‘End Of The EPA? Trump Admin. Considers Crippling Cuts To EPA’
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.
Read: Is The Republican Anti-Climate Change Agenda Killing Potential Employment Opportunities?
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.
Read: After Gag Orders And Freezes, What’s Going On At The Environmental Protection Agency?
“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.”
…Report: Even deeper cuts being discussed for EPA
By Jonathan Swan & Ben Geman
The Environmental Protection Agency isn’t fighting the White House’s initial budget that proposes to cut the agency’s budget by about $2 billion — or roughly 25% — and reduce the agency’s workforce by roughly 3,000 employees.
Climate change programs would be gutted under the proposal and the workforce attached to these programs would be cleared out of the agency — in line with the aggressive vision of EPA transition head Myron Ebell.
The Trump Administration, in fact, is now discussing making even deeper cuts to the EPA, according to a source privy to the White House’s internal deliberations. Senior Trump officials consider the EPA the leading edge of the administration’s plans to deconstruct the administrative state.
The only place where the EPA administrator Scott Pruitt pushed back substantially against the initial budget proposal was over the planned cuts to environmental cleanup projects. Pruitt has voiced support for funding to cleanup brownfields, which are contaminated former industrial sites that could be redeveloped.…
Cheers! Aussie Warmist ‘Climate Institute’ runs out of money
The The Climate Institute is a private think tank set up in 2005. It got about $2m a year back in the heyday of climate panic. Today Planet Earth is still about to collapse, but it’s not important enough for the team to keep working without a salary.
Source: Climate Institute runs out of money…