Tag Archives: national

Thanks to Trump, These Taxpayers May Avoid the IRS

by AdrienneLazarev Posted on April 18, 2017

Mother Jones

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President Donald Trump isn’t close to passing his proposed tax cuts yet, but he’s already inspired one group of taxpayers to avoid the IRS this year: undocumented immigrants. National Public Radio reports that while millions of undocumented immigrants previously filed federal tax forms to prove their “good moral character” in immigration proceedings, many are now wary of leaving a paper trail amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. While there is supposed to be a firewall between the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security, many immigrants are skeptical that it will protect them from deportation.

There is a widely held misconception that undocumented immigrants do not pay taxes. However, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a Washington, D.C. think tank, roughly half of undocumented immigrants pay taxes using the IRS’ Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITIN) program. The program is intended for nonimmigrant visa holders, contract workers, investors, and students. But many undocumented immigrants use it since it allows them to file taxes without obtaining a Social Security number. The ITIN program is used by 4.6 million people; in 2015, 900,000 people applied to get an ITIN. The largest numbers of ITIN users originate from Mexico, Guatemala, and India.

Undocumented immigrants are eligible for tax refunds and tax benefits such as the Child Tax Credit. This has caused conservatives to attack the ITIN program, demanding that Social Security numbers be required to receive the Child Tax Credit. Rep. Luke Messer (R-Ind.) recently proposed a bill that would require this.

While critics present the ITIN program as riddled with fraud and benefit theft, the reality is more complex. According to the IRS, in 2015 the average tax payment for ITIN users was $2,089, while the average refund for ITIN users was $2,896. Overall, ITIN users paid $23.6 million in taxes and received $9.9 million in refunds. As an IRS report points out, without the ITIN program, people without Social Security numbers could not legally file taxes, which would result in the loss of that tax income.

It is also common for undocumented immigrants to pay taxes by providing their employers with false Social Security numbers, paying for benefits they will never receive. The Social Security Administration estimates that in 2010, 1.8 million immigrants used falsified Social Security information resulting in $12 billion in tax revenue.

The anticipated drop in undocumented immigrants filing federal tax returns is part of their larger retreat from public life in the wake of Trump taking office. There are reports of immigrants refusing food assistance, medical services, and other public services, as well as refusing to report domestic violence for fear of drawing attention to their immigration status.

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Thanks to Trump, These Taxpayers May Avoid the IRS

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We Still Don’t Know How Much Trump’s Victory Was About Race

by DeweyRousseau Posted on April 10, 2017

Mother Jones

How much was race a factor in the 2016 election? It’s pretty obvious that Donald Trump explicitly appealed to racial sentiment more than any Republican presidential candidate in recent memory, but did it work? Did he pick up more votes from resentful, disaffected whites than any other GOP nominee would have?

At first blush, the answer seems to be no. Compared to Mitt Romney, Trump got a smaller share of the white vote and a bigger share of the black and Hispanic vote. That doesn’t support the idea that 2016 represented some kind of huge white backlash.

But there are other ways of looking at this. Here’s one from Phil Klinkner, a political science professor at Hamilton University. It’s taken from the latest release of the American National Election Survey:

This chart is pretty simple: it shows how much correlation there is between a person’s level of racial resentment and who they supported for president. In 2000, racial resentment was a weak predictor of who you voted for. In 2016 it was a strong predictor.

But this just adds to the haze. There are two reasonable ways of looking at this:

  1. Racial resentment has been a steadily better predictor of voting behavior for 16 years, with only a slight blip away from the trendline in 2012. Trump just happened to be the nominee in 2016, when it was bound to go up to its present level regardless.
  2. The trendline does inflect modestly upward in 2016. This might be because Obama bent it down a bit in 2012, or it might be because Trump bent it up in 2016.

Klinkner thinks race played a big role in the election. There’s no question this is true, but did it play a bigger than expected role? The two major parties have been splitting further apart by race for years, with Republicans becoming the party of whites and Democrats the party of non-whites. This means that to survive with an ever growing white base, Republicans have to cater to white resentment more and more. Likewise, Democrats have to cater to black and Hispanic interests more and more. This is a cycle with positive feedback, so it’s only likely to get worse.

Racial attitudes certainly played a bigger role in the election than in the past. But did Trump himself accelerate this partisan trend, or was he merely the beneficiary of it? That still seems like an open question to me.

Originally posted here:

We Still Don’t Know How Much Trump’s Victory Was About Race

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Trump Wants to Decimate Superfund. Here’s Why That Is Such a Terrible Idea.

by CareyDyctlgd Posted on April 6, 2017

Mother Jones

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When the White House unveiled its proposed budget for the upcoming year, environmentalists were outraged by the numbers. The Environmental Protection Agency is facing a steep 31 percent budget cut, and included in this were massive cuts to Superfund, a 37-year-old EPA program that cleans up and restores heavily polluted areas across the country. The proposal calls for reducing funding for the Superfund program from over $1 billion to just $762 million.

Superfund was created through the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act in 1980 on the heels of the Love Canal disaster, when a massive landfill that was used as a municipal and chemical dumping ground caused countless environmental and health problems for an entire upstate New York community, including homes and a school. More than 1,700 sites have been added to the list since 1980, but as of 2013, only 370 had been cleaned up and removed from the list. The overwhelming majority continue to be in different stages of cleanup. One example is East Chicago, Indiana, which EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt plans to visit on April 19. The town, which is mostly low-income, Latino, and black, is home to a USS Lead Superfund site—the old lead facility has contaminated soil with lead and arsenic.

But the Trump budget proposal could impede this progress and leave millions of Americans living near dangerous pollutants. “These sites pose devastating threats to the health of millions of people, including children, who live nearby,” Nancy Loeb, the director of the Environmental Advocacy Center, wrote in an op-ed for The Hill.

The proposed cuts might not halt the cleanups entirely but would substantially slow them down. Superfund sites tend to be located near lower-income neighborhoods and minority communities. According to the EPA, approximately 53 million people live within three miles of a Superfund site and 46 percent of them belong to a minority race—15 percent are below the poverty level.

It’s not just funds for cleanup that are in danger; so are the Superfund enforcement funds, the resources the EPA uses to hold companies and entities accountable. The proposal calls for a cut of nearly $29 million. According to a National Association of Clean Air Agencies report, “Without EPA’s enforcement, companies could avoid reporting, or minimize the reported amount of toxic materials released to the environment.” Under the Superfund law, in 2005 the EPA was able to hold General Electric accountable for dumping PCBs, a toxic chemical used in the manufacturing of electrical devices, into the Hudson River in New York for 30 years.

There are Superfund sites in every single state, the District of Columbia, and US territories, with more than 100 designated areas in New Jersey alone. This state is home to the most sites in anywhere in the country, and local officials are bracing for the impact of Trump cuts.

Consider Camden County, where from the mid-1800s until 1977, the company that would later become Sherwin-Williams dumped chemicals into Hilliards creek and constructed improper storage facilities that also leaked contaminants. The creek flows for more than a mile into Kirkwood Lake, which has also become contaminated; the soil in residential neighborhoods has been polluted too. What was once an idyllic backdrop for homes is now a shallow, dirty, mosquito haven. There have not been any reported health issues associated with the site, but there is a fish advisory because the lake is polluted with lead and arsenic.

The Superfund site was added to the National Priorities List in 2008, after contamination was found at the former site of the plant, but movement on the cleanup has moved at a glacial pace. “Thanks to an uprising in the community, the EPA and Sherwin-Williams began some of the residential cleanup,” Jeff Nash a Camden County elected representative, tells Mother Jones. For years, community members called on the EPA to begin the cleanup at the site. In 2014, the EPA, Sherwin-Williams, and Camden County held talks about taking steps to begin the process. But by April 2015, no concrete action had been taken, and property owners living near Kirkwood Lake protested the delays outside of a Sherwin-Williams paint store. Six months later, the EPA announced it had finalized a plan to begin removing contaminated soil near dozens of residential properties. There is no plan for cleaning the lake yet.

“It’s also a property tax nightmare—you can’t sell your house because it’s on a Superfund site,” Nash continued. The property values of known contaminated areas tend to fall drastically. “There has finally been some movement” on cleaning up the site in the last couple of years, he says, but there are fears that the Trump budget could upend all the progress. “From a county perspective, we’re very worried about it.”

Despite the Trump budget numbers, EPA chief Scott Pruitt has voiced his support of the Superfund program. Last month, he told the U.S. Conference of Mayors, “Superfund is an area that is absolutely essential.”

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Trump Wants to Decimate Superfund. Here’s Why That Is Such a Terrible Idea.

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The US Women’s Soccer Team Scored a Much-Needed Pay Bump

by KristinMickens3 Posted on April 5, 2017

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, the US women’s national soccer team notched a notable victory in its pursuit for equal pay. After a multi-year labor dispute, the team came to an agreement with the US Soccer Federation that will carry a big bump in compensation and expanded benefits.

The deal, which was part of an ongoing collective bargaining negotiation, will last five years and include the 2019 World Cup and 2020 Olympics. It is expected to significantly raise players’ base compensation and game bonuses, match per diem stipends with their counterparts on the men’s national team, bolster travel benefits, and improve financial aid for players who are pregnant or adopting, ESPNW reported on Wednesday. The US Women’s National Team Players Association, the union representing the players, would also gain some rights to licensing and sponsorship deals.

This week’s announcement ends a long and contentious fight over the team’s union agreement with US Soccer, the governing body for the sport. The fight came to a boil last February when US Soccer sued the union. At odds was whether a 2013 memorandum of understanding between the two sides could stand in for an earlier, expired collective bargaining agreement. The legal challenge came after the union’s former executive director, Richard Nichols, allegedly told US Soccer officials that the memorandum wasn’t valid and that, if the two sides failed to come to an agreement by the end of that February, the national team would be free to strike before the Olympics in Rio (Nichols denied saying this). A federal judge eventually ruled that, under the 2013 agreement set to expire that December, the team could not strike. But after talks stalled late last year and the players’ union changed leadership, the two sides spent the last four months hashing out an agreement.

And last March, five top players on the women’s national team filed a complaint to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission accusing the national soccer federation of wage discrimination. Financial details from the filing alleged that despite bringing in a projected $18 million in revenue to US Soccer, players on the women’s team earned four times less than their male colleagues. Jeffrey Kessler, who represents the players in the EEOC complaint, told Mother Jones that the charges remained pending and would continue.

As the New York Times reported, the enhanced pay announced this week is not necessarily on par with that of players on the men’s squad, though it means that some players could see their incomes double and earn between $200,000 and $300,000 in a year.

US Soccer president Sunil Gulati said in a statement that the new CBA represents “an important step to continue our longstanding efforts to drive the growth of women’s soccer in the United States.”

Current and former players also lauded the agreement. Megan Rapinoe, a midfielder on the women’s national team, said in a tweet that the agreement reflected a “crucial step” in the national team’s future.

The members of the women’s national soccer team aren’t the only women athletes who’ve made progress toward equal recently. Last week, after threatening to boycott the world championships in Michigan and earning the backing of several players’ unions and 20 US Senators, the US women’s hockey team reached a last-minute agreement with USA Hockey to improve compensation, benefits, and opportunities for future players. It included the prospect of each player making at least $70,000 before performance bonuses in the Olympics and world championships. Previously, the players were paid just $1,000 per month during a six-month training period before the Olympics.

Source – 

The US Women’s Soccer Team Scored a Much-Needed Pay Bump

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Use Your Seat Belt!

by Lily0784ngc Posted on April 5, 2017

Mother Jones

And now, from the Department of Random Stuff, we have seat belt use in the 50 states. Christopher Ingraham writes about this today over at Wonkblog, and his map showed shockingly low seat belt use. There were quite a few areas with seat belt use around 50 percent, and more than half the country was under 70 percent. Can that be true?

To find out, I headed over to the Owellian-named Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System at the CDC and created my own map. Here it is:

This doesn’t look so bad. The Dakotas are laggards at 70 percent, but most of the country is between 75-90 percent, with 11 states over 90 percent. The national average is 86.4 percent. I sort of assumed that after all these years, seat belt use was pretty much automatic for nearly everyone, but I guess not. Especially in the Dakotas.

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Use Your Seat Belt!

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Scott Pruitt kinda sorta maybe gets that carbon dioxide contributes to warming.

by Salina5452 Posted on April 3, 2017

In Louisiana, more than 18 percent of households didn’t have access to healthy food in 2015 (the national average is 13 percent). In urban centers like New Orleans, there isn’t enough locally grown produce to feed everyone, especially residents.

Marianne Cufone provides a fresh take on locally grown food. In 2009, she built what she describes as a “recirculating farm” on a half-acre plot in the middle of New Orleans. Using bamboo harvested from right there in Louisiana, she set up floating rafts and towers to grow plants — tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuces, strawberries — in closely packed, in various arrangements around hand dug, rubber-lined fish ponds. Water cycles between the pond and the plants, so nutrients from the fish waste fertilize the plants and the plants filter the water — no dirt required!

Cufone says her farming system is both cost- and energy-efficient, too. Startup costs totaled about $6,000, mostly to install the solar panels and backup batteries that allowed the farm operations to run mostly off-grid. And farms like this could work almost anywhere, she said. “You can grow vertically, in almost any design you want. It doesn’t matter if the land is rocky or paved or even contaminated.”

Cufone’s New Orleans farm initially sold $15 food boxes through a Community Supported Agriculture program and provided produce to local stores and restaurants. In 2011, Cufone started the Recirculating Farms Coalition to promote the idea and secure better policies to help them flourish. That includes pushing for the U.S. Department of Agriculture to allow recirculating farm produce to be certified organic.

Meet all the fixers on this year’s Grist 50.

Source: 

Scott Pruitt kinda sorta maybe gets that carbon dioxide contributes to warming.

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What Are Trump’s White House Aides Worth? Read Their Financial Disclosures

by ReyesSmartt Posted on April 1, 2017

Mother Jones

On Friday evening, the White House began releasing the financial disclosures of up to 180 top staffers. The forms provide a revealing though incomplete picture, showing an aide’s sources of income over the past year and his or her investments and debts, expressed in ranges not exact amounts. So far, these records show that Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump could be worth as much as $740 million and are still benefiting from their vast business holdings, including Ivanka’s stake in the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. And they indicate that chief White House strategist, whose assets are valued between $11.8 million and $53.8 million, earned a significant amount of his income last year from entities linked to Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, the conservative megadonors. Below are the disclosures of more than 30 officials. We’ll post more as they become available.

Stephen Bannon, assistant to the president and chief strategist

Katie Walsh, deputy chief of staff for implementation. (Walsh recently departed the White House for a job with an outside group promoting Trump’s polices.)

Sean Spicer, press secretary

Reince Preibus, chief of staff

Donald McGahn II, White House counsel

Stephen Miller, senior adviser to the president for policy

Omarosa Manigault, director of communications for the Office of Public Liaison

Jared Kushner, assistant to the president and senior adviser to the president

Makan Delrahim, deputy White House counsel

Gerrit Lansing, chief digital officer

Joseph Lai, special assistant to the president

Jennifer Korn, deputy director, White House

Jeremy Katz, deputy director of the National Economic Council

Kenneth Juster, international economic affairs

Gregory Katsas, deputy counsel to the president

Boris Epshteyn, assistant director of communications. (Epshteyn is reportedly leaving his White House role.)

Hope Hicks, director of strategic communications

Andy Koenig, special assistant to the president

Shahira Knight, special assistant to the president

Timothy Pataki, special assistant to the president, Office of Legislative Affairs

David J. Gribbin, special assistant to the president

James Burnham, senior associate counsel

Bill McGinley, White House cabinet secretary

Joyce Meyer, deputy assistant to the president and deputy director of legislative affairs

Uttam Dhillon, special assistant to the president and senior associate counsel

Ann Donaldson, special counsel to the president and chief of staff to the White House counsel

Benjamin Howard, special assistant to the president and house special assistant

Ashley Marquis, chief of staff, National Economic Council

Gary Cohn, director of the National Economic Council

Michael Ellis, special assistant to the president and associate counsel

Julia Hahn, deputy policy strategist

John Eisenberg, deputy assistant to the president, National Security Council legal adviser, and deputy counsel to the president for national security

Sebastian Gorka, deputy assistant to the president

Original post: 

What Are Trump’s White House Aides Worth? Read Their Financial Disclosures

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Will Trump’s EPA Greenlight a Pesticide Known to Damage Kids’ Brains?

by WolfganHQOJ Posted on March 27, 2017

Mother Jones

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By Friday, President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency will have to make a momentous decision: whether to protect kids from a widely used pesticide that’s known to harm their brains—or protect the interests of the chemical’s maker, Dow AgroSciences.

The pesticide in question, chlorpyrifos, is a nasty piece of work. It’s an organophosphate, a class of bug killers that work by “interrupting the electrochemical processes that nerves use to communicate with muscles and with other nerves,” as the Pesticide Encyclopedia puts it. Chlorpyrifos is also an endocrine disrupter, meaning it can cause “adverse developmental, reproductive, neurological, and immune effects,” according to the National Institutes of Health.

Major studies from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, the University of California-Davis, and Columbia University have found strong evidence that low doses of chlorpyrifos inhibits kids’ brain development, including when exposure occurs in the womb, with effects ranging from lower IQ to higher rates of autism. Several studies—examples here, here, and here—have found it in the urine of kids who live near treated fields. In 2000, the EPA banned most home uses of the chemical, citing risks to children.

Stephanie Engel, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina and a co-author of the Mount Sinai paper, says the evidence that chlorpyrifos exposure causes harm is “compelling”—and is “much stronger” even than the case against BPA (bisphenol A), the controversial plastic additive. She says babies and fetuses are particularly susceptible to damage from chlorpyrifos because they metabolize toxic chemicals more slowly than adults do. And “many adults” are susceptible, too, because they lack a gene that allows for metabolizing the chemical efficiently, Engel adds.

But even after banning chlorpyrifos from the home, the EPA allowed farms to continue spraying it, and while its US use has declined in recent years, it remains quite high, widely used on corn and soybeans in the Midwest and on fruit, vegetable, and orchard crops in Washington state, California, and the Southeast. California is home to about fifth of all the chlorpyrifos applied on US farms. There, the main target crops are alfalfa, almonds, pistachios, walnuts, tomatoes, and strawberries.

In October 2015, after a review spanning more than a decade, the EPA concluded that exposure to chlorpyrifos posed an unacceptable risk to human health, both from residues on food and in drinking water, and proposed a new rule that would effectively ban farm use of it. The agency also expressed concern about “workers who mix, load and apply chlorpyrifos to agricultural and other non-residential sites and workers re-entering treated areas after application.”

The EPA then dragged its feet on finalizing the rule; but in August 2016, a US Federal Appeals court demanded that a decision be made by March 31, 2017, chastising the agency for its “continued failure to respond to the pressing health concerns presented by chlorpyrifos.”

A few moths after that order, of course, Trump won the presidency, and so his EPA team will make the final decision on chlorpyrifos. Uh-oh. Trump often trumpets his own hostility to regulation and has backed it up by proposing a 31 percent cut in the EPA’s budget. Before taking office, Trump looked to Myron Ebell of the hyper-libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute to lead the EPA’s transition. Ebell focuses mainly on denying climate change and promoting fossil fuels, but as I noted in November, CEI runs a website, SafeChemicalPolicy.org, that exists to downplay the health and ecological impacts of pesticides.

Trump’s pick to lead the EPA, former Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, is a non-scientist with little track record in assessing the health risks posed by chemicals. But he does hew to Trump’s general hostility to regulation. At his confirmation hearings, Pruitt couldn’t name a single EPA regulation he supports, and he even declined to say whether he’d finalize the EPA’s proposed ban on asbestos.

Meanwhile, Dow and the pesticide industry trade group Croplife America are pushing the EPA to backtrack on the chlorpyrifos ban. “The court ordered EPA to make a final decision on the petition by March 31, 2017, but did not specify what that decision should be,” Dow noted in a November 10 press release urging the agency to maintain the status quo.

Dow AgroScience’s parent company, Dow Chemical, has also been buttering up Trump. The company contributed $1 million to the president’s inaugural committee, the Center for Public Integrity notes. In December, Dow Chemical Chairman and CEO Andrew Liveris attended a post-election Trump rally in the company’s home state of Michigan, and used the occasion to announce plans to create 100 new jobs and bring back another 100 more from foreign subsidiaries. Around the same time, Trump named Liveris chair of the American Manufacturing Council, declaring the chemical exec would “find ways to bring industry back to America.” (Dow has another reason beside chlorpyrifos’ fate to get chummy with Trump: its pending mega-merger with erstwhile rival DuPont, which still has to clear Trump’s Department of Justice.)

Kristin S. Schafer, policy director for the Pesticide Action Network, says it would be highly unusual for the EPA to backtrack on a decision to ban a chemical after so strongly signaling that it would. (PAN is one of the advocacy groups that sued the EPA in 2014 over its previous lack of action on chlorpyrifos.) But she added that “all bets are off with this administration.”

She pointed out that the EPA and Dow have been battling over the chemical since the Clinton administration. Back in 1996, the agency fined the company $732,000 for failing to disclose more than 100 reports of chlorpyrifos poisoning. “These reports are particularly important,” the agency complained, because chemicals enter the marketplace without any human testing, and poisoning notices “may document effects not seen in animal studies, or indicate areas which warrant further research.” Most of those alleged poisoning incidences involved exposure in the home—chlorpyrifos was then the most-used household and yard insect-killer. By 2000, as noted above, the EPA had seen fit to ban most home uses of the insect killer.

In an analysis of the risks posed by chlorpyrifos released in November 2016, the EPA crunched data on residues found in food and compared them to the levels at which the chemical can harm the most vulnerable populations: kids and women of child-bearing age. The results (found on page 23 of the EPA doc) are startling. Natural Resources Defense Council researchers turned them into this handy graphic:

NRDC

It would be quite something for the Trump administration to dismiss such overwhelming evidence from EPA scientists and continue allowing chlorpyrifos to be sprayed on crops with few restrictions. But he has already displayed a willingness to trash the agency’s rule-making process to placate his Big Ag supporters.

Originally posted here:

Will Trump’s EPA Greenlight a Pesticide Known to Damage Kids’ Brains?

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Here’s What a Zinke-Led Interior Department Will Look Like

by OpalDulhunty1 Posted on March 16, 2017

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Amid the flurry of Trump administration appointments in recent months, Secretary of Interior Ryan Zinke was one of the less controversial. The former Montana congressman says climate change is not a “hoax” and federal lands should not be transferred to states en masse. His January Senate confirmation hearing went fairly smoothly, with none of the major gaffes or arguments that have plagued other appointees’ hearings. So far, his stated priorities for Interior have been vague but unsurprising: rebuilding trust between the public and the department, increasing public lands access for sportsmen, and improving outdated infrastructure at national parks. But considering the controversial issues embedded in those priorities he’ll soon have to wrangle, the ride won’t stay smooth for long.

Perhaps the biggest questions around Zinke’s Interior are how he will balance a mining and drilling-friendly agenda with habitat conservation and access to public lands, as well as how he will achieve his priorities if President Donald Trump follows through with major budget cuts.

On March 2, his first day in office, Zinke signed two secretarial orders that swiftly reaffirmed his allegiance to the sportsmen community. One order aims to create more access to public lands for hunters and anglers. Sportsmen’s groups like the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership have lauded the gesture at a time when an increasing amount of public land blocked off by private landowners who control access points. “Sportsmen access is a huge issue,” says TRCP President Whit Fosburgh, who adds that one of the biggest reasons hunters quit the activity is loss of access.

One way Zinke could increase public land access is to push for more money for the Land and Water Conservation Fund — a repository created by Congress in 1964 to use royalties from offshore oil and gas to protect land and water. “It’s the number one access tool we have in this country,” says Backcountry Hunters and Anglers Director Land Tawney. “Ninety percent of its funds are used on access.” Though Zinke supported permanently reauthorizing the LWCF as a congressman, Congress has kept it chronically underfunded for years.

Zinke’s secretarial order also calls for more emphasis on wildlife conservation, though details were slim. While the hook-and-bullet crowd is pleased with the attention to preserving habitat, another one of Zinke’s priorities may counteract it: energy development. Zinke has supported oil and gas drilling and mineral extraction on public lands. In his confirmation hearing, he said, “President-elect Trump has declared energy dominance to be a strategic economic and foreign policy goal of the United States and that he intends to unleash America’s $50 trillion in untapped shale, oil, and natural gas reserves.” Zinke has already opened 73 million offshore acres in the Gulf of Mexico for leasing. In the rural West, accelerated energy development could do irreparable harm to wildlife migration corridors and habitat. “That’s what makes us nervous,” Tawney says.

Whether Zinke is able to encourage wildlife conservation will also depend on Interior’s new budget. The Trump administration reportedly wants to cut 10 percent of Interior’s budget for fiscal year 2018. That would mean potentially fewer funds for habitat projects such as restoring streams or clearing invasive species. And at a time when an enormous amount of resources must be dedicated to fighting wildfires, such a budget cut would be devastating. “It’s crazy to think you can keep cutting budgets and be good stewards of the land and be the next Theodore Roosevelt,” Fosburgh says.

Another priority in Zinke’s Interior will be to address the $12.5 billion backlog of needed infrastructure repairs at national parks. The secretary has said he hopes to seek funding through Trump’s anticipated federal jobs and infrastructure bill.

One of Zinke’s top priorities may be one of the most slippery: restoring trust in the Department of Interior among an angry set of Westerners who have deep-seated distrust in federal government. To a large crowd of Interior staffers in DC earlier this month, Zinke portrayed the distrust of his department as a result of managers and rangers lacking the proper tools or authority to make decisions in the field — a problem he vowed to help fix. During his confirmation hearing, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, asked Zinke how he will protect agency employees “in an era where hostility toward federal lands and federal officials is rampant, particularly in rural areas.” Zinke responded: “As someone who has led soldiers in combat, I am committed to the safety of the Department’s employees. I am also committed to restoring trust by freeing up our employees to make decisions and to collaborate with local law enforcement if things get difficult.”

Other issues the new Interior secretary has commented on in recent weeks include Native American rights. Zinke told the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs last week that “one thing is very clear: sovereignty should mean something.” The National Congress of American Indians has commended his attention to Native American issues thus far. The secretary also signed an order reversing an Obama administration ban on lead bullets meant to protect California condors, eagles and other scavengers that can be poisoned by such ammunition.

There’s still a lot we don’t know about what a Zinke-led Interior will look like. He has been quiet on how he will combat climate change as the head manager of a fifth of the nation’s landmass, in contrast to his two predecessors, who created climate research centers and pushed renewable energy. Zinke has also said he will conduct a “bold” restructuring of the Interior Department, though details on that are so far nil.

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Here’s What a Zinke-Led Interior Department Will Look Like

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Trump’s “skinny budget” may slash EPA funding even more than previously reported.

by Ludie69E Posted on March 16, 2017

A self-described “anonymous environmental activist collective” spelled out “NO MORE TIGERS, NO MORE WOODS” in six-foot-high letters at the Trump National Golf Club in Rancho Palos Verdes, California.

“It’s a protest piece against Trump’s administration’s handling of our environmental policies,” one of the activists told a local ABC affiliate, using a voice disguiser. “He’s been very aggressive in gutting a lot of the policies that we’ve had in place for a very long time. We felt it necessary to stand up and go take action against him.”

Plus the activists don’t like golf courses. “Tearing up the golf course felt justified in many ways,” one activist told the Washington Post. “Repurposing what was once a beautiful stretch of land into a playground for the privileged is an environmental crime in its own right.”

The Washington Post article originally called the action a “daring act of defiance.” Though accurate, the description irritated Eric Trump, the president’s second-oldest son:

The Post then changed its story to say the group “pulled off an elaborate act of vandalism.”

No comment from Tiger Woods, who has golfed with Donald Trump and said he plays pretty well for an old guy.

Originally posted here: 

Trump’s “skinny budget” may slash EPA funding even more than previously reported.

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