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Common Dreams reports
Thanks to a hiring freeze, budget cuts, and the exorbitant travel needs of Trump's cabinet, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) agents are being forced to ditch climate crime investigations in order to serve as personal bodyguards for EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, resulting in what one critic called an "evaporation of criminal enforcement".
"The EPA head has traditionally had one of the smallest security details among cabinet members," the Washington Post reported [September 19]. But Pruitt's expansive security team--which cost taxpayers over $830,000 in his first three months as EPA chief--has shattered all precedent.
"This never happened with prior administrators", Michael Hubbard, former head of the EPA Criminal Investigation Division's Boston office.
Pruitt's 24/7, 18-member security detail "demands triple the manpower of his predecessors" and is forcing "officials to rotate in special agents from around the country who otherwise would be investigating environmental crimes", the Post's Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis noted.
These officials "signed on to work on complex environmental cases, not to be an executive protection detail", Hubbard observed. "It's not only not what they want to do, it's not what they were trained and paid to do."
The impact of this transfer of resources can already be seen in the rapidly falling number of new cases opened by the EPA's Criminal Investigation Division. Eilperin and Dennis note that the "current fiscal year is on pace to open just 120 new cases...down sharply from the 170 initiated last year".
(Score: 5, Funny) by khallow on Thursday September 21 2017, @08:27AM (12 children)
Also note that the department has been greatly reduced [govexec.com] over the years. Somehow that didn't make it into this story. A heightened demand for manpower for unrelated purposes isn't going to help, but they would be doing fewer cases anyway.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @10:36AM (10 children)
It is our right as American citizens to pollute the environment as much as we like, to plunder natural resources with no thought to their sustainability and to choke our competitors by making their air unbreathable thus eliminating them from the contest all in the pursuit of the fastest buck and return on investment possible, to take the profit and run leaving the suckers to clean up the mess (if they survive). Which Amendment is that again? Remind me please.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bradley13 on Thursday September 21 2017, @10:46AM (5 children)
AC: you are making the assumption that the EPA cares about the environment. In fact, they have long succumbed to Pournelle's Iron Law: Any actual environmental protection they achieve is purely incidental to their primary mission, which is simply to exist, and ideally to grow in influence and power. There are plenty of blatant cases of EPA nuttiness, where petty bureaucrats decide to make someone's life miserable, because they can.
As for the current director's sense of entitlement, demanding 24/7 protection: If a bureaucrat does his job so poorly that he is in continual and serious danger from ordinary citizens, well, I'm not seeing the need to protect him from his mistakes.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @04:24PM (4 children)
You have a grave misunderstand of how the EPA works that is echoed in the many talk radio dunderheads out there that have formed this ignorant point. The EPA is overwhelmingly driven by the law Congress levies all this regulatory stuff on them, which is why it isn't so simple to just do away with this or that regulation. Sure, it fits the your misguided narrative of the faceless "petty" bureaucrat with his greedy drive for "influence and power" making life hell for "the little guy", and keeping us from getting to Make America Great Again, but most of that stuff is the law. If the law says EPA has to do such-and-such, Pruitt can't decide not to. He needs to get Congress to change the law. It is the same with the IRS. The overwhelming amount of stuff they do is driven by the Byzantine tax laws put in by Congress! These are issues Congress has to address, not Pruitt nor Trump.
When you hear apocryphal tales of petty power hungry bureaucrats (is this the supposed "deep state", or does that go deeper than this?) being spun on TV or the radio, here's a clue: you're being sold a bill of goods for some purpose.
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @05:32PM (1 child)
*Yawn* The EPA, like other agencies, are given a broad law and have the choice of how they wish to enforce it. Nice song and dance though.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @05:57PM
Ignorance will kill us all. Thank you for helping destroy the US /s Though seriously it is probably about time we got our asses handed to us and developed some humility. Trump is the wildest and most accurate caricature of what is wrong with our country.
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Friday September 22 2017, @05:49PM
That was informative. Still, wouldnt it be possible to "drag your heels" quite a lot, if that was to your personal benefit?
Thought experiment:
Imagine, that a president appoints mr. Alphonse Gabriel Capone [wikipedia.org], as new director of the Bureau for Alcohol Tobacco and Fire-arms.
Now it is mr. Capone's duty as head of the department to enforce the law w.r.t. proper regulation of the alcohol businesses of the U.S.A.
However, imagine that he has also worked other places, where the profit motive inspired a certain attenuation of exactly that set of laws he's now responsible to uphold and implement.
Wouldn't there be a moral hazard for regulatory capture?
In which way is it different for mr. Scott Pruitt [wikipedia.org]?
Serious question.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday September 23 2017, @03:33AM
"Most". I mentioned Superfund a few back as an example of law that shouldn't be law because it is unconstitutional.
He does have the power to change how those laws are regulated even when they are legal.
So we're supposed to ignore those tales when they serve your interests? I'll note that I linked to a real world tale, not an apocryphal one. It was a couple (the Sacketts) who weren't even allowed to contest the fines and demands that the EPA had made on their construction site for a house (which the EPA had determined had contained some wetlands illegally filled in - and which the Sacketts disputed from the beginning). Basically, according to the EPA, the Sacketts had to pay fines of up to $37.5k per day [reason.com] plus revert the portion of their land that the EPA deemed was wetlands before the EPA would allow them to contest the EPA ruling. In one of the frequent 9-0 rulings during the Obama administration, the US Supreme Court ruled that was bunk.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Thursday September 21 2017, @11:11AM (1 child)
Amendments 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th, 9th, and 10th amendments in the stuff I mentioned. They could have done the pollution reduction stuff they do legally, but it would have been somewhat more expensive and difficult to implement from the federal government point of view.
The silliest part of your argument is the assumption that if one doesn't like the over-the-top activities of the EPA, then one must be for unimpeded pollution of the worst sort. But then again, some of the dumbest arguments I've ever heard came from authoritarian environmentalists (for example, being skeptical, as in having said opinion and saying it aloud, of the urgency of global warming is a crime against humanity which should be punishable in a court of law, the Moon should be off limits to humans to protect its pristine environment in the environmental sense, or advocating the banning of chemicals, particularly the hubbub that often surrounds the dihydrogen monoxide joke, because they sound scary). I guess there's not much room left for smarts after you cram all that other stuff in.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @12:43PM
Don't worry, if we break the Environment the Market will change it for a new one.
(Score: 4, Funny) by realDonaldTrump on Thursday September 21 2017, @12:49PM (1 child)
The Second Amendment people are terrific. There's a tremendous power behind the Second Amendment. 🇺🇸
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday September 21 2017, @02:01PM
I've heard of the boss undermining underlings, but ye Gods man, announcing that those with the means, self-training, and inclination to assassinate Pruitt are fine people? If I was in Pruitt's shoes, and my boss make a remark like that, I'd resign immediately.
Isn't Pruitt doing the job you wanted, making the EPA completely ineffective so businesses can strip mine all our resources as fast as possible? Denying that there's a climate change problem? Drill, baby, drill! Well, there's no denying he's a dummy, pressing decidedly ambivalent people into guarding his body. If an assassin comes for him, what are the odds these bodyguards abandon him? Heck, maybe the assassins will be his own body guards, like what happened to Indira Gandhi. Nah, environmental fanatics tend not to be gun nuts.
Oh, right, you're the dude who throws loyal underlings under the bus in a heartbeat when it seems expedient. Don't even have to accuse him of disloyalty. You've been overusing that reason anyway. (How are you getting on with Mr. Bannon these days? Your relationship with him a bit chilly?) In this case, just accuse Pruitt of having gone native.
(Score: 0, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @12:48PM
IIRC you've criticized the lack of enforcement of certain laws. Is this also not an acceptable tactic for immigration laws?