[AMV] President Trump #281 Make America Disapprove Again

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The EPA Needs Lots of Money to Gut Itself
Trump’s budget proposal would slash funding to the agency, which may run counter to his more ambitious goals.

There is, as yet, no 2018 budget for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

What exists instead is a “skinny budget” proposal, released on Thursday by the White House. It advances a drastic and aggressively curtailed agenda for the EPA, planning to cut the agency’s budget by 31 percent while laying off 3,200 employees. Popular programs—like EnergyStar and some Superfund cleanups—would be slowed down or eliminated.

But a skinny budget proposal is still just a proposal—and a funny one at that. While this proposal hints at President Trump’s governance priorities, and serves as an initial negotiating position, it mostly markets his ideological bonafides to other Republicans. It’s fiduciary fan fiction for conservatives, basically, with little chance of becoming law. Not only will a tiny EPA be politically difficult to enact, but there are also sticky legal limits on the extent to which the non-military side of the government can be defunded.

It can hint at other negotiations, though: how much Cabinet secretaries are able to wrangle for their agencies. And on that front, there was a curious anecdote in Coral Davenport and Glenn Thrush’s New York Times story about how the Trump skinny budget came together. As you read it, remember that Obama left the EPA with a budget of $8.2 billion:

"The E.P.A. administrator, Scott Pruitt, who has himself spoken out against some of the core missions of the agency he leads, went to the White House to request a smaller cut after the White House budget office first presented him its preferred spending level. He pressed for about $7 billion, according to the person. Instead, the White House slashed his budget down even further, to about $5.7 billion."

The Times is right: Scott Pruitt does seem to be “against some of the core missions of the agency.” He’s no environmentalist, either: He recently told CNBC that he doubted some of the most basic premises of climate science.

So if he hates the EPA so much, why is he fighting for more funding for it? In the past few weeks, I’ve heard some legal experts wondering if his goals for the EPA don’t gel with the White House’s, at least on some points.

When you listen to the president’s advisors, they indicate near total hostility for the EPA’s mission. Stephen Bannon, a senior advisor to Trump, has famously preached the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” Mick Mulvaney, the White House budget director, told reporters on Thursday that: “We’re not spending money on [climate change] anymore. We consider that to be a waste of your money.”

Trump has promised the same. In a Republican primary debate last year, he said that “we are going to get rid of [the EPA] in almost every form.”

Certainly Pruitt shares many of these goals. During his confirmation process, he could not name a single rule under the Clean Air Act or Clean Water Act that he supported. As attorney general of Oklahoma, he sued the agency 14 times, and he’s said that the EPA should cede much of its power back to states (even as he reportedly prepares to fight California’s special ability to restrict air pollution).

Pruitt is a savvy attorney who knows the EPA’s guiding statutes well. His statements and behavior suggest that he doesn’t want to temporarily injure the agency by defunding it. Instead, he wants to permanently hobble it by inscribing weak rules that will outlast his term as administrator and the Trump presidency.

But that will take a lot of employees and a lot of time.

“It’s really staff intensive to rescind a rule and then replace it,” says Ann Carlson, a professor of environmental law at the University of California Los Angeles. “To the degree that you have a vision about how the agency should operate, you need a staff and leadership.”

And Pruitt will have to rescind and replace a lot of rules. President Trump has already asked him to replace car fuel-efficiency standards and the Waters of the United States rule, which sets the legal authority of the Clean Water Act. The EPA is also expected to withdraw Obama’s Clean Power Plan soon, which limits greenhouse-gas emissions from the power sector.

Every one of these revisions or revocations will set an onerous bureaucratic process in motion that will last for years. Every time an EPA policy changes, agency employees have to draft the text of a new rule, then hire outside consultants to calculate its economic effects and public-health consequences. Other employees process the tens of thousands of public and industry comments that greet the proposal or withdrawal of any rule. Each of these comments must be read, categorized, and replied to.

Over time, for each of these changes, the employees build up an “administrative record” that supports the agency’s decision to endorse a certain rule. An administrative record is bookshelves and bookshelves of binders describing the EPA’s process, basically. And when the agency gets sued over a new rule, as it almost always does, all those binders come in handy.

“EPA gets challenged a ton [in court], but they win most of the time,” says Carlson. “And one of the reasons they win, even with conservative courts, is that they’re very careful in really examining the science and building an administrative record that demonstrates expertise, and care, and thoughtfulness.”

That record-building requires staff. It takes people to write policy, it takes people to commission studies, and it takes people to meet with industry. It takes people to coordinate all the other people. As John Cannon, who worked as general counsel to the EPA during the Clinton administration, told me: “It takes agency resources to do the revisions that the Trump administration says it wants to do.”

Without all those resources, the EPA may start to founder. Its loose, weak new rulemaking processes may run aground. And it may fail to properly address crucial issues that will become legal problems for it later. “It strikes me that you increase your legal vulnerability when you cut staff dramatically, because the way you protect yourself legally is to be really careful and thorough,” says Carlson.

Chaos may be fine for the White House’s Bannonites. And it will be good for some fossil-fuel interests, too: An understaffed and anxious EPA won’t be able to issue a new climate-change plan, pushing U.S. regulation of greenhouse gases further into the future. It will be hard for a future administration to reclaim the institutional knowledge lost in the layoffs to come.

But Pruitt won’t be able to get what he wants out of a denuded agency, either. A tiny budget will unleash internal disorder that could last for years. A smaller staff of EPA bureaucrats may struggle to process four or five major rule changes at once, like writing a replacement Waters of the United States rule while issuing a replacement Clean Power Plan (or justifying the lack of one). Other work simply can’t be avoided: Even though Trump rescinded car fuel-efficiency requirements last week, the EPA and Department of Transportation must re-issue new and final versions by 2020.

This is what ran through my head as I thought of Pruitt going back to ask for a $7-billion budget—and promptly getting rebuffed. Trump may be fine with superficially damaging the administrative state until fiscal year 2022. But if Pruitt wants to permanently hinder it, he needs money.

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Op dinsdag 21 maart 2017 11:05 schreef xpompompomx het volgende:

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Rex is ook geen groot liefhebber van moeilijke vragen:
I’m not a big media press access person. I personally don’t need it.

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Rex Tillerson is still acting like a CEO

ExxonMobil’s global headquarters are situated on a campus in Irving, Texas, beside a man-made lake. Employees sometimes refer to the glass-and-granite building as the “Death Star,” because of the power that its executives project. During the eleven years that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson served as ExxonMobil’s chairman and chief executive, he had an office on the top floor, in a suite that employees called the “God Pod.” When I visited a few years ago, the building’s interior design eschewed the striving gaudiness of Trump properties; it was more like a Four Seasons untroubled by guests.

When Tillerson travelled, he rarely flew commercial. The corporation’s aviation-services division maintained a fleet of Gulfstream and Bombardier corporate jets at Dallas Love Field Airport, a short drive away. Whether Tillerson was flying to Washington, Abuja, Abu Dhabi, or Jakarta, he would typically be driven in a sedan to a waiting jet. He boarded with a meticulously outlined trip schedule and briefing books. He worked and slept aboard in private comfort, undisturbed by strangers, attended by corporate flight attendants.

During his years running ExxonMobil, Tillerson rarely gave interviews. (He declined my repeated requests for one when I was working on a book about the company, “Private Empire,” which came out in 2012, although he authorized some background interviews with other ExxonMobil executives.) Tillerson’s infrequent public appearances were usually controlled and scripted. A few times a year, he turned up at a think tank or an economic club, where he read a prepared speech and then accepted a handful of audience questions. He was usually at ease and on message during these sessions, yet he rarely allowed himself to be questioned freely by professional journalists.

All this may help explain the strange judgments that Tillerson has made in the six weeks since he took over the State Department. He has managed to turn his unwillingness to engage with the press into at least as big a story as his early diplomatic efforts in Asia and Europe. Last week, during an important trip to Japan, South Korea, and China, Tillerson refused to travel on a plane large enough to carry the diplomatic press corps. Instead, he invited a single reporter, Erin McPike, from a digital news site whose chief executive is a former Republican Party communications specialist. When McPike asked Tillerson why he wouldn’t travel with more reporters, he told her, “Primarily, it’s driven—believe it or not, you won’t believe it—we’re trying to save money. I mean, quite frankly, we’re saving a lot of money by using this aircraft, which also flies faster, allows me to be more efficient.”

One could perhaps detect the entitlement of a man who has come to appreciate high-end Gulfstreams. The cost issue is not trivial, especially since Tillerson has publicly endorsed President Donald Trump’s initial budget plan to eviscerate State Department and foreign-aid spending by more than thirty per cent. Yet, in an Administration led by a President who incurs tens of millions of dollars in extra expenses by spending his weekends at his private club in Florida, such parsimony is a weak excuse, particularly as reporters who fly with the Secretary of State pay for their seats, at commercial first-class rates.

To McPike’s credit, she pressed Tillerson several times on the press-access question, and he offered additional explanations for his reticence. “What I’m told is that there’s this long tradition that the Secretary spends time on the plane with the press,” he said. “I don’t know that I’ll do a lot of that.” He added, “I’m not a big media-press-access person. I personally don’t need it.” These remarks justifiably inflamed reporters on Twitter and in other forums. They pointed out that, in a democracy, the purpose of press coverage of powerful government figures who shape national security is not to celebrate them or to raise their profile (admittedly, this appears to be President Trump’s hypothesis) but to render their assumptions and their decisions transparent and accountable to the public.

This function of the press in no way comports with Tillerson’s experience at ExxonMobil. Some corporations, like Apple and Starbucks, are dependent on fickle consumer preferences and public attitudes for the health of their businesses. For them, media strategy is part and parcel of their business model. ExxonMobil is not such a corporation. Oil is not an especially popular product, and its production generates manifold controversies, yet just about everybody needs oil, at least for now, so well-run corporations in the industry can be as durable as public utilities, no matter what consumers think. Some time ago, ExxonMobil executives concluded that they were better off avoiding journalists to the extent that it was possible, and putting out what little they had to say on their own Web site.

Tillerson told McPike that he understood that, as Secretary of State, he is now accountable to the American public, but he added that he was determined to do things his way, because, at ExxonMobil, he had “been very successful diplomatically over twenty-five years” by staying quiet and letting the governments he negotiated with manage their own domestic politics. This is a narrow conception of “diplomacy,” however, one where bargains are struck on the basis of private interests.

In the sort of diplomacy that Tillerson must conduct now, secret talks certainly have their place; for example, in forging breakthroughs like President Nixon’s opening to China or President Obama’s to Cuba. More routinely, however, diplomatic success requires using interviews, press conferences, social media, and speeches to address and shape public and legislative opinion simultaneously in multiple countries, including the United States. Last week, in Asia, Tillerson emphasized the seriousness of the threat from North Korea’s nuclear program and said that he would help lead a new, more confrontational policy to denuclearize the region. Yet, if democractic legislatures and citizens in countries such as Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan, and the nations of the European Union don’t find Tillerson and the Trump Administration open, credible, and willing to address hard questions, including those posed by their own media, they are not likely to follow them into some new and more martial policy in Northeast Asia—and certainly not if Trump’s hawkishness could put their own territories and economies at risk.

“I would hope that people can maintain their patience in these early days and recognize I’ve only been at it six weeks,” Tillerson told McPike. That’s fair—Tillerson has no government experience, and perhaps he can learn how to change the narrative around his role as Secretary of State from his insupportable treatment of the media to the conduct of American foreign policy. In his interview with McPike, Tillerson did have some interesting things to say about policy. He talked of an “inflection point” in relations between great powers, and of the complications facing the United States and China as they reset the discussion of how to preserve peaceful coexistence for the next fifty years. Tillerson’s remarks suggest that his problem is not that he can’t handle the press but that he is too hubristic or too set in his ways to accept the challenge—and the fundamental responsibility of holding high public office in a democratic country.

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Op dinsdag 21 maart 2017 11:51 schreef Ludachrist het volgende:

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Dat verbaast niemand.

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Op dinsdag 21 maart 2017 13:23 schreef Blik het volgende:

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Sites als dedagelijksestandaard zie ik al regelmatig voorbij komen op mijn tijdlijn bij Facebook.