EPA to drop 3,000 jobs as Upper Midwest gets its reward for helping Trump

Rss@dailykos.com (mark Sumner) · Tuesday, April 18, 2017, 4:13 pm

Republicans have never been able to show that environmental regulations are actually job killers. But as Politico reports, Scott Pruitt’s moves to destroy the EPA certainly are costing some jobs.

President Donald Trump’s proposed cutbacks to the Environmental Protection Agency may include the closure of the agency’s regional office in Chicago, a move that could undermine the agency’s ability to monitor pollution in the Great Lakes and curtail its ability to implement enforcement actions against coal-fired power plant owners in the six-state region. …

Under the administration’s plan, 3,000 EPA employees nationwide would lose their jobs. Closing the Chicago office, and eliminating its 1,000 positions, would help accomplish that goal.

Of course, by Republican measures, those EPA employees working to make sure Americans have clean water, clean air, and decent living conditions aren’t doing real jobs. And by extension the people those EPA workers rent homes from, and buy groceries from, and support in a hundred other ways, don’t have real jobs. Neither do the people that those people support. Only ignoring the environment and the public good can create a real job.

The Chicago office supports the Great Lakes region, an area also under assault in Trump’s budget through other cuts. As reported by the The Detroit News.

Trump’s budget plan would slash the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget by nearly a third, including reductions for the agency’s enforcement and compliance office and ending the $300 million-a-year Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, among other regional efforts.

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