President Trump's Budget, Air, and Water

1110 E. 168^th Place

South Holland, IL 60473 

President Trump

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

Washington DC 20500

11 April 2017 

Dear President Trump,  

Yesterday’s New York Times contains an article that details how budget cuts would affect the functioning of the Environmental Protection Agency.  Often the public is told that cuts would eliminate bureaucratic redundancies and government waste.  This article underlines how the deep cuts your budget is proposing would affect the daily lives of Americans.  I urge you to reconsider these cuts based on what the results would be. 

Your budget would cut spending on the EPA by 31 percent, from 8.1 billion to 5.7 billion.  This move would eliminate 15,000 jobs. 

Specifically, the budget would cut the Public Water Supervision Grant Program which allows states to monitor public drinking water and without which, communities like Flint, Michigan, would never know their lead pipes were poisoning their citizens. 

Your budget would reduce spending on civil and criminal enforcement of pollution violators by 60% -- from 10 million to 4 million – making it difficult to stop the most egregious pollution violations.  Yet at the same time would fund a round-the-clock security detail for EPA administrator Scott Pruit, something that has never been funded by the agency before. 

Your budget would end regional clean-up programs including Chesapeake Bay, the Guld of Mexico, And Francisco Bay, and the Great Lakes – amounting to 4 million in cuts.  Experts believe this could also open the EPA to lawsuits that would completely eliminate the savings and would cast the government even more, 

Your budget would cut in half the Superfund program, which identifies polluters and makes then pay for the cleanup.  This would allow the most toxic sites to continue to hurt people.

Eliminating the EPA’s research budget would make it impossible to identify and evaluate potentially hazardous substances like endocrine interrupters and other substances found in everyday items which could cause cancer and other diseases. 

Your budget would completely eliminate emissions testing and, in the years it would take to set of your propose testing system that automakers would pay for, would significantly increase air pollution resulting in more asthma and other respiratory ailments. 

There is more, but I have to go to work.  Clearly, these cuts could hurt and quite possibly kill regular Americans (though they might benefit large corporations’ bottom lines).  My life and health, and the life and health of my children and neighbors is at stake here.  Don’t cut EPA funding.  Instead consider increasing it. 

Regards, 

Bill Boerman-Cornell