Tag Archives: obama

Cutting food waste helps companies profit.

by MartaMarko Posted on March 7, 2017

Mustafa Ali helped to start the EPA’s environmental justice office and its environmental equity office in the 1990s. For nearly 25 years, he advocated for poor and minority neighborhoods stricken by pollution. As a senior adviser and assistant associate administrator, Ali served under both Democratic and Republican presidents — but not under President Donald Trump.

His departure comes amid news that the Trump administration plans to scrap the agency’s environmental justice work. The administration’s proposed federal budget would slash the EPA’s $8 billion budget by a quarter and eliminate numerous programs, including Ali’s office.

The Office of Environmental Justice gives small grants to disadvantaged communities, a life-saving program that Trump’s budget proposal could soon make disappear.

Ali played a role in President Obama’s last major EPA initiative, the EJ 2020 action agenda, a four-year plan to tackle lead poisoning, air pollution, and other problems. He now joins Hip Hop Caucus, a civil rights nonprofit that nurtures grassroots activism through hip-hop music, as a senior vice president.

In his letter of resignation, Ali asked the agency’s new administrator, Scott Pruitt, to listen to poor and non-white people and “value their lives.” Let’s see if Pruitt listens.

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Cutting food waste helps companies profit.

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Trump Simmers and Priebus Lies: Just Another Weekend at the White House

by EdithCMYkdwjq Posted on March 6, 2017

Mother Jones

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Over at the Washington Post, Philip Rucker, Robert Costa and Ashley Parker report on the Trump White House:

Trump was mad — steaming, raging mad….“He was pissed,” said Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax, a conservative media company. “I haven’t seen him this angry.”…At the center of the turmoil is an impatient president increasingly frustrated….Trump [] has been feeling besieged, believing that his presidency is being tormented in ways known and unknown by a group of Obama-aligned critics, federal bureaucrats and intelligence figures….The next morning, Trump exploded….Trump summoned his senior aides into the Oval Office, where he simmered with rage….In a huff, Trump departed for Mar-a-Lago….Trump was brighter Sunday morning as he read several newspapers, pleased that his allegations against Obama were the dominant story, the official said….But he found reason to be mad again.

That’s the president. Here’s his chief of staff, Reince Priebus:

As reporters began to hear about the Oval Office meeting, Priebus interrupted his Friday afternoon schedule to dedicate more than an hour to calling reporters off the record to deny that the outburst had actually happened, according to a senior White House official….Ultimately, Priebus was unable to kill the story. He simply delayed the bad news, as reports of Trump dressing down his staff were published by numerous outlets Saturday.

In other words, the president’s chief of staff spent a full hour of his time on Friday lying to reporters off the record. Why? To cover up for the fact that Trump routinely melts down when he gets bad press. The only thing that cheered him up was all the attention he got when he told an outrageous lie about Barack Obama.

Finally, this: “Some Trump advisers and allies were especially disappointed in Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), who two days earlier had hitched a ride down to Florida with Trump on Air Force One.” This is truly their world view. Trump let Rubio fly on Air Force One, so Trumpworld expected Rubio to back up Trump’s lie. Transactional to the end.

And this: the Post’s story was based on 17 interviews with “top White House officials, members of Congress and friends of the president.” In other words, people who are basically sympathetic to Trump. What’s up with that? Do these people really think that painting Trump as a petulant two-year-old will make him look better?

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Trump Simmers and Priebus Lies: Just Another Weekend at the White House

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Sean Spicer Is Brilliant

by Dallas Weiter Posted on March 5, 2017

Mother Jones

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I was looking forward to the next White House press briefing, knowing that whoever ran it would be inundated with questions about President Trump’s dimwitted suggestion that President Obama had him wiretapped. That would be fun! But I underestimated the cleverness of Sean Spicer:

In a statement from his spokesman, Mr. Trump called “reports” about the wiretapping “very troubling” and said that Congress should examine them as part of its investigations into Russia’s meddling in the election.

“President Donald J. Trump is requesting that as part of their investigation into Russian activity, the congressional intelligence committees exercise their oversight authority to determine whether executive branch investigative powers were abused in 2016,” Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, said in the statement.

No comment until the “investigation” is finished! That’s brilliant. I don’t know if it will work, but it’s brilliant. I wonder how aggressive the press corps will be about calling out this obvious artifice?

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Sean Spicer Is Brilliant

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Trump: Obama Tapped My Phone, He’s a Sick Guy

by RosemaryCaird5 Posted on March 4, 2017

Mother Jones

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It’s Saturday. I figured I’d sleep in and eat breakfast before I checked in on the news. After all, how much can happen on a Saturday morn—

Oh FFS. Fine. Let’s hear the evidence:

Then, just to show how serious this is, an hour later Trump tweets about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “pathetic” ratings on Celebrity Apprentice. Then it’s off to the golf course.

So what’s going on? Did Obama really tapp Trump Tower during the sacred election process? I hope so! If he did, it would mean a judge had found probable cause that Trump had committed a crime of some kind.

Alternatively, it could mean that the FBI or the NSA was listening to a foreign phone call and Trump was on the other end. That would be great too.

Or, of course, Trump might be full of shit. Sadly, this is the most likely possibility. But you never know. Maybe there’s some real dirt here and Trump is trying to get ahead of it. When it leaks, he’ll try to convince everyone that the real issue is all the illegal leaks. Or the Nixonian/McCarthyite use of wiretaps. Or the fact that Obama is a sleaze, which is guaranteed to excite the base.

In any case, our next White House press briefing should be interesting, don’t you think?

UPDATE: Hmmph. Breitbart News ran a story yesterday summarizing a Mark Levin radio show that outlined a bunch of stuff that’s already been reported, including the fact that a FISA warrant was obtained to monitor the communications of some Trump aides:

In summary: the Obama administration sought, and eventually obtained, authorization to eavesdrop on the Trump campaign; continued monitoring the Trump team even when no evidence of wrongdoing was found; then relaxed the NSA rules to allow evidence to be shared widely within the government, virtually ensuring that the information, including the conversations of private citizens, would be leaked to the media.

Is that it? The Washington Post reports that the Breitbart story “has been circulating among Trump’s senior staff.” How boring.

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Trump: Obama Tapped My Phone, He’s a Sick Guy

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Tom Perez Wins Race for DNC Chair

by IKSNoellstniyi Posted on February 25, 2017

Mother Jones

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The election for DNC chair is over, and Tom Perez won:

Sigh. This is so ridiculous. I know that Keith Ellison was the “Bernie guy” and Perez was the “Obama/Hillary guy,” but it’s nuts that this got turned into some kind of ideological showdown. Not only are Ellison and Perez about equally progressive, but DNC chair isn’t a policy position anyway. It’s a fundraising and managerial position. I didn’t really care one way or the other between the two because I have no idea which of them is a better manager and fundraiser.

In any case, thank goodness that Ellison and Perez themselves are grownups. Perez, in what was obviously a prearranged move, immediately offered Ellison the deputy chair job, and Ellison accepted:

This strikes me as the best of all outcomes. Democrats get to keep Ellison in Congress, and hopefully Perez will give him some real authority at the DNC. Better two high-profile guys there than one.

Besides, national-level purity contests are stupid. Democrats are fine at the national level. It’s every other level that they suck at. Anybody who spends any time or energy continuing to fight over some national standard of progressiveness at the DNC is just wasting everyone’s time. From a party standpoint, state and local races are all that matter for the next couple of years.

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Tom Perez Wins Race for DNC Chair

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Donald Trump’s Mystery $50 Million (or More) Loan

by TomokoProud Posted on February 23, 2017

Mother Jones

Among Donald Trump’s debts—the source of some of his most intractable conflicts of interest—is a mystery loan that Trump has not publicly explained. And this means that the president could have a secret creditor to whom he owes tens of millions of dollars.

According to Trump’s financial disclosure records and various news reports, Trump is carrying hundreds of millions of dollars in debt. These transactions could provide his creditors with leverage over the new commander-in-chief. Moreover, it would be difficult for Trump to refinance or modify the terms of his various loans without raising suspicion that he is receiving favorable treatment because of his position. (Imagine a bank gives him a good rate. Would this suggest it might receive preferential treatment from the US government Trump heads?) Because Trump has refused to release his tax returns, it’s impossible for the public to know exactly how much he owes and to whom. And Trump never kept his campaign promise to reveal all his creditors and obligations.

The financial disclosure form he filed last year did note more than a dozen loans totaling at least $713 million. But the full amount could be more. And buried in the paperwork is a puzzling debt that ethics experts say could suggest that Trump has a major creditor he has not publicly identified.

According to the disclosure, in 2012, Trump borrowed more than $50 million from a company called Chicago Unit Acquisition LLC. (The true value of the loan could be much higher; the form requires Trump only to state the range of the loan’s value, and he selected the top range, “over $50,000,000.”) Elsewhere in the same document, Trump notes that he owns this LLC. That is, he made the loan to himself. There’s nothing necessarily unusual about that.

Here’s where the situation gets odd. With Trump owning the Chicago Unit Acquisition LLC—and the LLC being owed $50 million or more by Trump—this company should be listed on Trump’s disclosure as worth at least that much, unless it has debt offsetting this amount. Yet on Trump’s latest disclosure form, Chicago Unit Acquisition is not listed at all. The disclosure rules say that any asset worth more than $1,000 must be noted. So this is the mystery: Why is this Trump-owned firm that holds a $50 million-plus note from Trump not worth anything?

The answer could be that Chicago Unit Acquisition has its own debts that cancel out its value, says Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, who specializes in government and corporate ethics. In other words, Trump’s LLC could owe $50 million and possibly much more to one or more creditors that have not been disclosed to the public. Though the president essentially could be on the hook to some entity or some person for over $50 million, the financial disclosure rules do not require Trump to list the loans and liabilities of companies he owns. (He only has to reveal his personal loans.)

“I think the American people are at risk because we don’t know know with whom Donald Trump is entangled financially,” Clark says. “If I owe a lot of money to someone, I will probably want to do what I can to keep that person or institution happy. We don’t know the terms of this debt and we don’t know whether Donald Trump will be tempted to look out for his own financial interest in addressing the concerns of his creditor, whoever that is.”

A recent Wall Street Journal article noted that Trump pays a minimum of $4.4 million a year in interest in connection with his loan from Chicago Unit Acquisition LLC. His disclosure form states he pays the prime interest rate plus 5 percent for this loan. (Consequently, Chicago Unit Acquisition would have at least that much in annual revenue, though none is reported.) And the Journal report deepened the mystery. It noted that it had paid two research firms to search for paperwork connected to this loan, but both came up empty-handed.

In a 2016 interview with the New York Times, Trump briefly addressed the loan. He said that he had purchased the debt, via Chicago Unit Acquisition, from a group of banks he had previously borrowed from. Jason Greenblatt, the Trump Organization’s chief legal officer, would not discuss with the Times why Trump had not simply retired the debt and instead was continuing to pay interest on it. “I am not sure it’s appropriate for us to discuss our sort of internal financial reasoning behind transactions in the press,” Greenblatt told the Times. “It’s really personal corporate trade secrets, if you will. Neither newsworthy or frankly anybody’s business.”

On his 2015 disclosure form, Trump did list Chicago Unit Acquisition LLC as having a value, putting it at between $1,000 and $25,000—still substantially lower than the sum Trump reports owing to it. When the Times asked Trump why Chicago Unit Acquisition LLC was valued so low on his financial disclosure, he replied, “We don’t assess any value to it because we don’t care. I have the mortgage. That is all there is. Very simple. I am the bank.”

“Whether or not Mr. Trump cares or not about a liability is irrelevant to his obligation to disclose information on the Form 278,” says Norm Eisen, who was a top ethics attorney in the Obama administration and who now co-chairs Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “Questions about the apparent inconsistency in how the loan was and is treated on his disclosures are legitimate, and a normal president would provide additional information to clear them up.”

Alan Garten, Trump’s personal attorney, did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the White House.

Richard Painter, who served as the chief ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration and who co-chairs CREW with Eisen, says if there are no loans offsetting the value of Chicago Unit Acquisition, Trump’s disclosure form should list the outstanding debt as an asset. “None of the underlying assets or liabilities of the LLC owned by Trump need to appear on the 278—just its net value and Trump’s ownership in it,” Painter says. “That is one of the reasons the form is incomplete. If the LLC is owed money, that is a positive; if it owes money, that is a negative, for determining its value.”

Either Trump’s disclosure report is incomplete or there could be a hidden creditor, Eisen and Painter assert. If Trump were to release his tax returns, as all other major presidential candidates have done in recent decades, they point out, he could clear up the matter by providing information on his interest payments. (Eisen and Painter have filed a lawsuit against Trump alleging that the president has violated the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution by maintaining a number of beneficial financial relationships with foreign governments.)

“Without more information, we cannot properly assess the import of this entry, or of the changes in how it was reported,” Eisen says. “We need those additional details, including to assess possible conflicts. It may well be the case that the answers lie in Mr. Trump’s tax returns, but he has refused to provide them. This is yet another transparency failure on the part of the president.”

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Donald Trump’s Mystery $50 Million (or More) Loan

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Trump Expected to Sign Executive Orders Hitting the EPA

by DemetriFarris Posted on February 16, 2017

Mother Jones

Scott Pruitt will almost certainly be the next head of the Environmental Protection Agency. The Oklahoma attorney general’s nomination is expected to sail through Senate—possibly as soon as Friday—despite Democrats’ protests that he is unfit to lead an agency that he has repeatedly sued. The administration has already imposed a freeze on the EPA’s social media, halted its rulemaking, and reportedly mandated that all agency research be reviewed by a political appointee before being released to the public. But next week, once Pruitt is sworn in, the real frenzy will begin.

According to Reuters, President Donald Trump plans to sign between two and five environmental executive orders aimed at the EPA and possibly the State Department. The White House is reportedly planning to hold an event at the EPA headquarters, similar the administration’s roll-out of its widely condemn travel ban after Defense Secretary James Mattis took office. While we don’t know what, exactly, next week’s orders will say, Trump is expected to restrict the agency’s regulatory oversight. Based on one administration official’s bluster, the actions could “suck the air” out of the room.

Trump may have hinted at the forthcoming orders in his unwieldy press conference on Thursday. “Some very big things are going to be announced next week,” he said. (He didn’t make clear whether or not he was referring to the EPA.)

Former President Barack Obama’s array of climate regulations, including the Clean Power Plan limiting power plant emissions, are certainly high on conservative activists’ hit list. So too is the landmark Paris climate deal, in which Obama agreed to dramatically cut domestic carbon emissions and provide aide to other countries for clean energy projects and climate adaptation. The EPA’s rule that defines its jurisdiction over wetlands and streams is also a prime target. As attorney general, Pruitt launched lawsuits against a number of these regulations.

“What I would like to see are executive orders on implementing all of President Trump’s main campaign promises on environment and energy, including withdrawing from the Paris climate treaty,” said Myron Ebell, who headed Trump’s EPA transition and recently returned to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, in an email to Mother Jones.

H. Sterling Burnett, a research fellow the Heartland Institute, which rejects the scientific consensus on climate change, says Trump could start by revisiting the Obama administration’s efforts to calculate a “social cost of carbon“—and by forbidding its use to determine costs and benefits of government regulations. He also wants to see broader restrictions on how the EPA calculates costs and benefits. In particular, Burnett hopes Trump will prohibit the agency from the considering public health co-benefits of regulations—for example, attempts by the EPA to argue that limits on CO2 emissions from power plants also reduce emissions of other dangerous pollutants.

Or Trump could take a cue from Republican Attorneys General Patrick Morrisey (W.V.) and Ken Paxton (Texas), who recommended in December that Trump issue a memorandum directing the EPA to “take no further action to enforce or implement” the Clean Power Plan. (The Supreme Court halted implementation of the rule a year ago while both sides fight it out in federal court).

The holy grail for conservatives would be reversing the agency’s so-called “endangerment finding,” which states that greenhouse gas emissions harm public health and must therefore be regulated under the Clean Air Act. The endangerment finding is the legal underpinning for the bulk of Obama’s climate policies, including the restrictions on vehicle and power plant emissions. Undoing the finding wouldn’t be an easy feat and can’t be accomplished by executive order alone. The endangerment finding isn’t an Obama invention; in 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA must regulate greenhouse gasses if it found they harmed public health. Pruitt said during his confirmation hearing that the administration wouldn’t revisit the finding, but he also launched an unsuccessful lawsuit against it in 2010. Neither Ebell nor Burnett expects to see Trump to tackle the endangerment finding just yet.

Environmentalists are already planning their response. Litigation is certainly an option, but it would of course depend on the details of Trump’s executive actions. Several groups, including EarthJustice and Natural Resources Defense Council, have already sued to block Trump’s earlier executive order requiring that every new regulation be offset by scrapping two existing regulations. Their case: The administration can’t arbitrarily ditch regulations just because the president wants fewer of them on the books.

They could be making a similar case soon enough. “A new president has to deal with the record and evidence and findings,” EarthJustice’s lead attorney, Patti Goldman, said. “If you take climate and the endangerment finding, that is a scientific finding that is upheld by the court. That finding has legal impacts. If there’s a directive along those lines, there will have to be a process.”

Of course, anti-EPA Republicans disagree about what is constitutional, which is one reason the agency is in for a tumultuous ride over the next four years. For many conservatives, no EPA at all—or at least one that has no regulatory powers—is the best option. “I read the constitution of the United States, and the word environmental protection does not appear there,” said Heartland’s Burnett. “I don’t see where it’s sanctioned. I think it should go away.” A freshman House Republican recently introduced a bill to do just that, but there’s no sign that it’s going to pass anytime soon.

And while Burnett acknowledges that the EPA probably won’t be vanishing in the near future, he’s been happy with the direction Trump has taken so far. He’s pleased with the president’s moves to restart the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines, and he’s hopeful that the administration will move toward an EPA with “smaller budgets and a smaller mission, justified by the fact that you’ll have fewer regulations.”

Depending on what Trump does next week, that could be just the beginning.

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Trump Expected to Sign Executive Orders Hitting the EPA

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The Question the White House Won’t Answer: Did Trump’s Campaign Have Contact With Russia?

by cheriehatten008 Posted on February 14, 2017

Mother Jones

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The first question at White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s daily briefing on Tuesday—half a day after the news broke that national security adviser Michael Flynn had resigned—focused on a key issue: Flynn’s contacts with the Vladimir Putin regime during the campaign. Flynn has been under fire for his post-election conversations with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak, during which he discussed the sanctions President Barack Obama was imposing on Russia as punishment for Moscow’s meddling in the US election. But ABC News’ Jonathan Karl asked whether any Trump associates were in touch with the Russian government before the election.

This is important, for that would mean that Trump folks were in contact with the Putin regime while it was attacking American democracy. Trump and his team have adamantly denied there were any interactions with Russian officials. At a press conference in mid-January, Trump ignored a question about such contacts. Once the event was over, he said, “No contact.” Days later, on Face the Nation, incoming Vice President Mike Pence said the Trump campaign had no interactions with Moscow. Host John Dickerson asked him, “Did any adviser or anybody in the Trump campaign have any contact with the Russians who were trying to meddle in the election?” Pence declared, “Of course not. And I think to suggest that is to give credence to some of these bizarre rumors that have swirled around the candidacy.”

Yet the Washington Post reported days ago that Kislyak told the newspaper he had been in touch with Flynn since before the election. The ambassador declined to say what he and Flynn had discussed. And the newspaper reported that the Flynn-Kislyak conversations “were part of a series of contacts between Flynn and Kislyak that began before the Nov. 8 election and continued during the transition, officials said.” These facts and Kislyak’s comment undercut Trump’s and Pence’s assertions there were no pre-election contacts.

So what was Spicer to say when Karl posed this query? At first, Spicer said that Flynn did speak to the Russian ambassador during the transition. No, Karl protested, that’s not the question. What about before the election? Spicer then sputtered out this reply: “There’s nothing that would conclude me that anything different has changed with respect to that time period.”

That contorted reply would seem to mean that the White House is sticking to its previous denial. But this assertion runs contrary to what is now the public record: that the Trump campaign was in contact with Putin’s man in Washington while Putin was subverting an American election to help Trump. What was going on? What was said? What messages did Flynn send to the Putin regime? These are the obvious questions that warrant answers. They are also dangerous questions for Trump. And that’s why Spicer cannot acknowledge the hard truth that the Flynn scandal started before the election. These contacts deserve as much, if not more, attention than the conversations that triggered this controversy, for they are relevant to the fundamental subject at hand: Trump’s relationship with the autocratic leader who mounted an operation to subvert American democracy to assist Trump.

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The Question the White House Won’t Answer: Did Trump’s Campaign Have Contact With Russia?

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President Trump Likes Graphics and Maps

by Mariam89Z29516 Posted on February 13, 2017

Mother Jones

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Here is more on President Trump’s reading habits:

While Mr. Obama liked policy option papers that were three to six single-spaced pages, council staff members are now being told to keep papers to a single page, with lots of graphics and maps. “The president likes maps,” one official said.

One page with lots of graphics and maps? Is there room for any words at all? Hell, even comic books have words. We also learn this:

Two people with direct access to the White House leadership said Mr. Flynn was surprised to learn that the State Department and Congress play a pivotal role in foreign arms sales and technology transfers. So it was a rude discovery that Mr. Trump could not simply order the Pentagon to send more weapons to Saudi Arabia — which is clamoring to have an Obama administration ban on the sale of cluster bombs and precision-guided weapons lifted — or to deliver bigger weapons packages to the United Arab Emirates.

Congress keeps getting in his way! But I guess that’s not going to last long. Here is Stephen Miller on Face the Nation, where John Dickerson asked him about yet another branch of government that’s been getting in Trump’s way:

We have a judiciary that has taken far too much power and become in many case a supreme branch of government….The idea that you have a judge in Seattle say that a foreign national living in Libya has an effective right to enter the United States is beyond anything we’ve ever seen before.

The end result of this, though, is that our opponents, the media and the whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions, that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned.

Tough talk! Dickerson also asked Miller what Trump is planning to do about North Korea’s “intolerable” ballistic missile test yesterday:

MILLER: So you saw the president following through on exactly what he said he would. He went out last might in front of the TV cameras and stood shoulder to shoulder with the prime minister of Japan and sent a message to the whole world that we stand with our allies….

DICKERSON: So no other show of strength in terms of military —

MILLER: That show last night was a show of strength, saying that we stand with our ally. Having the two men appear on camera worldwide to all of planet earth was a statement that will be understood very well by North Korea.

That’s…not so tough. In political movies, the final act often has the president going in front of the cameras and saying something strong and resolute—which somehow makes the opposition melt away. I guess Miller and Trump believe this is how the real world works too. Merely appearing on camera is a show of strength that will surely stop these North Korean tests in their tracks.

Then again, Trump has warned us many times that he doesn’t like to signal military action before it happens. Maybe he’s planning to lob a nuke at Pyongyang on Monday. Can anyone say for sure that he won’t?

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President Trump Likes Graphics and Maps

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Now Trump’s Going After the Bumblebees

by DamionCopeley95 Posted on February 10, 2017

Mother Jones

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First, it was puppies. Now Trump is going after bees.

Just weeks before leaving office, the Obama administration’s Fish and Wildlife Service placed the rusty patched bumblebee on the endangered species list—the first bee species to gain that status in the continental United States. Just weeks after taking office, the Trump administration temporarily reversed that decision. (See great pictures of this charismatic pollinator here.)

The official announcement of the delay cites a White House memo, released just after Trump’s inauguration, instructing federal agencies to freeze all new regulations that had been announced but not yet taken effect, for the purpose of “reviewing questions of fact, law, and policy they raise.” The Fish and Wildlife Service, which oversees the endangered species list, acted just in the nick of time in delaying the bumble bee’s endangered status—it was scheduled to make its debut on the list on February 10.

Rebecca Riley, a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me the move may not be a mere procedural delay. “We don’t think this is just a freeze—it’s an opportunity for the administration to reconsider and perhaps revoke the rule entirely,” she said.

Why would the Trump administration want to reverse Endangered Species Act protections for this pollinating insect? After all, the rusty patched bumble bee has “experienced a swift and dramatic decline since the late 1990s,” with its abundance having “plummeted by 87 percent, leaving small, scattered populations in 13 states,” according to a December Fish and Wildlife Service notice. And it’s not just pretty to look at—the Fish and Wildlide Services notes that like other bees, rusty patched bumblebees “pollinate many plants, including economically important crops such as tomatoes, cranberries and peppers,” adding that bumblebees are “especially good pollinators; even plants that can self-pollinate produce more and bigger fruit when pollinated by bumble bees.”

The answer may lie in the Fish and Wildlife Service’s blunt discussion of pesticides as a threat to this bumblebee species. Like commercial honeybees, bumblebees face a variety of threats: exposure to pesticides, disease, climate change, and loss of forage. FWS cited all of those, noting that “no one single factor is likely responsible, but these threats working together have likely caused the decline.” But it didn’t mince any words about neonicotinoids, a class of insecticides widely used on US farm fields.

Neonics, as they’re known, are a highly contentious topic. They make up the globe’s most widely used insecticide class, with annual global sales of $2.6 billion, dominated by agrichemical giants Syngenta and Bayer (which is currently in the process of merging with Monsanto). They have been substantially implicated in the declining health of honeybees and other pollinators, birds, and waterborne animals. The European Union maintains a moratorium on most neonic use in farming, based on their threat to bees. The US Environmental Protection Agency is currently in the middle of a yearslong reassessment of the risk they pose to bees and other critters.

Here is what the Fish and Wildlife Service wrote about neonics in the context of the rusty patched bumblebee:

Neonicotinoids have been strongly implicated as the cause of the decline of bees, in general, and for rusty patched bumble bees, specifically. The introduction of neonicotinoid use and the precipitous decline of this bumble bee occurred during the same time. Neonicotinoids are of particular concern because they are systemic chemicals, meaning that the plant takes up the chemical and incorporates it throughout, including in leaf tissue, nectar and pollen. The use of neonicotinoids rapidly increased when suppliers began selling pre-treated seeds. The chemical remains in pre-treated seeds and is taken up by the developing plants and becomes present throughout the plant. Pollinators foraging on treated plants are exposed to the chemicals directly. This type of insecticide use marked a shift to using systemic insecticides for large-scale, preemptive treatment.

Note also that of the 13 states that still harbor scattered rusty patched bumblebee populations, four—Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Ohio—are in the US Corn Belt, where corn and soybean crops from neonic-treated seeds are common.

The NRDC’s Riley noted that as the EPA reassess neonics, it is obligated to consider the insecticides’ impact on endangered species. If the rusty patched bumblebee makes it onto the list, that would place an endangered species that’s clearly harmed by neonics directly into the region where the lucrative chemicals are most widely used—possibly forcing it to restrict neonic use in those areas. It’s worth noting that the man Trump chose to lead the EPA transition team, Myron Ebell, works for the industry-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute, which runs a website, SafeChemicalPolicy.org, that exists to downplay the health and ecological impacts of chemicals. More on that here.

If science guides the Trump team, this fast-disappearing bumblebee will get its endangered status soon, Riley said. “We don’t think there’s any legitimate basis to roll this rule back,” she said. “The original decision to protect the bee was based on compressive scientific analysis.” The question is the degree to which science will guide the administration as it decides the fate of this once-flourishing insect.

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Now Trump’s Going After the Bumblebees

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