So here’s what Conspiracy-Theorist-in-Chief wants to do to the EPA (from the Washington Post):

The Trump administration plans to take a sledgehammer to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Thursday’s proposal by the White House would slash the EPA’s budget by 31 percent — nearly one third — from its current level of $8.1 billion to $5.7 billion. It would cut 3,200 positions, or more than 20 percent of the agency’s current workforce of about 15,000.

“You can’t drain the swamp and leave all the people in it. So, I guess the first place that comes to mind will be the Environmental Protection Agency,” Mick Mulvaney, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, told reporters. “The president wants a smaller EPA. He thinks they overreach, and the budget reflects that.”

I have so much to quote from this article… it’s fucking disgusting…

The proposed budget, if enacted, would discontinue funding for the Clean Power Plan — the signature Obama administration effort to combat climate change by regulating carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. It would sharply reduce money for the Superfund program and cut the budget for the EPA’s prominent Office of Research and Development roughly in half, to $250 million.

It also would eliminate “more than 50 EPA programs.” Among them: the Energy Star program, which aims to improve energy efficiency and save consumers money; infrastructure assistance to Alaska Native villages and the Mexico border; a grant program that helps cities and states combat air pollution; and an office that focuses on environmental justice issues.

Funding for the massive Chesapeake Bay cleanup project, which receives $73 million each year, would be cut to zero. Similar cleanup programs in the Great Lakes — a massive undertaking championed by President Barack Obama and his first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel — and elsewhere in the country would suffer the same fate, returning “responsibility for funding local environmental efforts and programs to state and local entities, allowing the EPA to focus on its highest national priorities,” according to the White House.

This is bad. Very bad.

Have people forgotten what the US was like before the EPA?

From the WaPo article…

But the proposed cuts raise questions about what would happen in key areas such as enforcement targeting environmental crimes, an area in which the EPA has often stepped in when states are unable or unwilling to prosecute polluters.

Cynthia Giles, who headed the EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance during the Obama administration, said in an email that enforcement staff at the agency has already been reduced 20 percent over the past eight years, bringing it to its lowest level since the enforcement office was created in 1995.

“[More cuts] won’t just drastically reduce EPA enforcement, it will bring it to a halt,” she said. “Not only will the staff be a shadow of its former self, the inspectors, lawyers and criminal agents who would be left would be unable to do their jobs, because these cuts would zero out the already small amount of funds used to do inspections, monitor pollution and file cases.”

The US without a functioning EPA would be a US where we have to wear face masks in order to breathe, purify water before drinking it, and generally stay inside buildings with artificial air which will be safer to breathe than the air outside.

I guess if you’re a greedy asshole who’s always looking to make more money, there’s a silver lining: you could get in on the bottled water market, or be one of the first to sell over the counter bottled oxygen.

And, of course, Agent Orange wants to sink this money into defense and his precious Great Border Wall of the US.