The Trump administration is being accused of racism for cutting a wasteful program that’s given leftist groups tens of millions of dollars to help poor, minority and indigenous communities attain “environmental justice.” The initiative was launched under Barack Obama’s first Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief, Lisa Jackson, to help low-income populations obtain the same degree of protection from health and environmental hazards as wealthy communities. Over the years, heaps of taxpayer dollars have filled the coffers of leftwing groups—including some dedicated to helping illegal immigrants—that teach black, Latino and indigenous folks how to recycle, reduce carbon emissions through “weatherization” and participate in “green jobs.”
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The cash flowed freely through the EPA’s special environmental justice office, which the Trump administration plans to get rid of as part of a broader budget cut for the famously bloated agency. This is great news for American taxpayers who were forced to fund this nonsense. Judicial Watch has reported extensively on the EPA’s environmental justice boondoggle and exposed the atrocities that occurred under the reckless initiative. Here are some examples of how the money was used; to teach residents of public housing about recycling, seniors to reduce their “carbon footprint,” inner city neighborhoods about “climate-change readiness” and middle school students with a “disparate economic and racial/ethnic composition” how to “identify and mitigate air pollution and solid waste disposal issues.” Low-income public school students were taught asthma self-management skills, poor minorities got asthma-friendly homes and a New Jersey group called Lazos America Unida that helps Mexican immigrants got money to create a “lead-safe backyard gardening” program to protect members from the risks associated with gardening in lead contaminated soil.
Another environmental justice grant recipient, a migrant farm workers’ group in Missouri, used its taxpayer dollars to explain symbols and key words on television weather advisories and to “increase awareness about the dangers of sun and heat exposure” in migrant communities. Other leftist groups used their environmental justice cash to educate migrant workers from Mexico and Guatemala about “pesticide exposure” risks and to help the poor “evaluate toys and find out about toy recalls.” The list of ludicrous programs funded by the EPA’s environmental justice office goes on and on. The Obama administration also forced virtually every major government agency—including the departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Agriculture, Justice, Health and Labor—to participate in its environmental justice initiative. This required making environmental justice part of their mission and providing the public with annual progress reports on their efforts to help minorities that live in the shadows of society’s worst pollution.
The Trump administration plans to put an end to this madness that’s fleeced Americans out of huge sums. News reports indicate that 25% of the EPA’s budget will get cut and that will translate into the end of several Obama-era programs such as environmental justice, Global Change Research and Clean Power Plan, among others. This means that the gravy train will come to an abrupt halt and leftist groups as well as their allies in the mainstream media are incensed. The nation’s largest and most influential environmental organization has even whipped out the race card, accusing the Trump administration of being racist for slashing the environmental justice office. In a mainstream news report that was widely reprinted, a director at the Sierra Club club said this: “To cut the environmental justice program at EPA is just racist. I can’t describe it in any other terms than a move to leave those communities behind. I can’t imagine what the justification would be, other than racism.”
25% of the EPA budget is a start, but 100% should be the goal. The EPA is only one of the departments that shouldn’t even exist and can longer be funded. DOE, FDA, DOA, OSHA, DHS, HUD, there are plenty of money wasters that should be ended completely, not scaled back, not replaced, not reorganized, just ended.
Ed: You are more correct than you can ever imagine. Just think for every failed GS-13/14/15/SES there is at least one contractor (in the national capitol region) who either tells the Government staffer what to think or just writes his, her or its papers for them.
I wish you’d run for office. There are too few clear thinkers in the USA. Kill the Dept of State, USAID, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the majority of the banking regulatory agencies and you’ve got my vote.
Hey, Sierra Club, our country is 20 TRILLION in the hole. What do you do when your household budget has more outgo than income? What I do is start cutting the “can live withouts”. This is one of them.
Ed, let’s not go overboard. Sure, the pendulum needs to swing back, and swing back HARD. Clean Air and clean water are still worthy goals for governments to focus on — just ask the Chinese about that. I would venture to say that the EPA could do what we need to keep doing with about 25% – 33% of its current budget…
Nah, let’s go even further. The EPA doesn’t do anything that I need to keep doing. Everything they do needs NOT to be done.
Ed, I’m from Kentucky. I have seen with my own eyes the evil done to the environment by unscrupulous people left to their own twisted motives. There is a role for government, and a role for the liability lawyers in holding the environment rapists to account.
Bob I’m from NY and I’ve seen the harm that bureaucrats, lobbyists, lawyers do to communities, people, our freedoms in the name of the environment. This is an excuse to rape the people and destroy our nation.
Remember acid rain, the ozone hole, the end of the as we know it by 2000? All the same old environmentalist BS. In the 70s it was the coming ice age, now its settled science.
Only a moron can say anything in science is settled.
Bob, all the damage to the mountains done by strip mining outfits was done with the blessing of the EPA. If you could say that strip mining was destroying mountains and the EPA stopped it, I’d say, good work, EPA. That ain’t the case, though.
Peabody started their strip mining before the EPA was created in 1970. The EPA never did anything to stop it. John Prine wrote a song about it in ’69 and put it on his first album in ’71.
Bob, how many of your fellow Kentuckians are out of work (former coal miners) because of Obama’s Clean Power Initiative (war on coal)? Have you no compassion for these victims of government regulation and meddling in the private sector (power generation)? How many Kentucky children are homeless, starving and cold because your misguided environmental religion requires it?
Did anyone in the Obama “administration” even collect those statistics, or did they ignore the problem because it has bad optics (starving children don’t make happy newspaper photos)?
If you hate your neighbors so much, why don’t you move? And government can be the biggest polluter of all:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/08/09/navajo-nation-epa-spill/31384515/
Good points, James. EPA and OSHA have put tens of thousands of miners out of work while allowing the coal operators to strip mine with impunity. Obama used the destruction the EPA allowed as an excuse to try to shut down coal burning power plants, but he never went so far as to order the EPA to shut the strip mining operations down.
Bob thinks that we need the EPA because someday they might actually make the coal operators stop ruining the Appalachians. If they were going to do that, they could have done it starting 47 years ago, but they haven’t done shit.
I say shut their fraudulent asses down now.
Can anyone think of a pair of words squishier than “environmental justice?” Talk about an amorphous clot of lefty twaddle! Someone please tell me WHAT IT MEANS!! Is it the working title of a Steven Seagal sequel…”OUT FOR ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE.” Does Seagal beat the evil polluters black and blue with a strip of government-approved weather-stripping?
Apparently, all one has to do is tack the word “justice” on the end of a fed mandate and money will be duly shoveled at any dopey project imaginable, so long as it involves paint chip munching minorities.
Here in Minneapolis in the late 80’s they built the “Kondirator” – a garbage burner built to burn – among other things – metals. It sits between the Mississippi and North Minneapolis (the hood). The liberal Minneapolitans were fine with it as long as it only affected black people and poor white trash. There is such a thing as environmental justice. I wouldn’t think we’d need the EPA to have a division of environmental justice, but poor people generally don’t have a lot of money to fund lawsuits. The sierra club is more likely to get involved if it affects someplace they hope to go camping.
Roll government back prior to income tax becoming the law.