He writes this editorial in the New York Times:
A Lesson Trump and the E.P.A. Should Heed
In March 1983, President Ronald Reagan asked me to return to Washington to run the Environmental Protection Agency. I had been the E.P.A.’s first administrator, from 1970 to 1973, and over the agency’s first 10 years, it made enormous progress in bringing the country’s worst pollution problems under control despite resistance from polluting industries and their lobbyists. A worried and outraged public had demanded action, and the government responded.
Yet the agency and its central mission came under attack during the 1980 presidential campaign. The Clean Air Act was criticized as an obstacle to growth. The agency was seen as bloated, inefficient, exceeding its congressional mandates and costing jobs. The Reagan administration and its new administrator were going to fix that. Sound familiar?
A bit more:
Budget cuts that hurt programs that states now have in place to meet those duties run the risk of returning us to a time when some states offered industries a free lunch, creating havens for polluters. This could leave states with strong environmental programs supported by the public at a competitive disadvantage compared to states with weak programs. In other words, it could lead to a race to the bottom.
Voters may have supported Donald J. Trump believing his campaign rhetoric about the E.P.A. But they don’t want their kids choking on polluted air or drinking tainted water any more than Hillary Clinton voters, and as soon as the agency stops doing its job, they’re going to be up in arms.
No Bill - the EPA has grown to be a bloated bureaucracy and is greatly overstepping it's original mandate. Little Timmy will not have his feet rot off because he was playing in a polluted stream. That part of the EPA works and will continue to work in the future. The EPA's infringement on personal water rights, Environmental Justice, over-the-top species protection, climate change and others are beyond the scope of the agency and need to be pruned back. President Trump is only cutting their budget by 19% - not a catastrophic amount although Ruckelshaus wants you to believe otherwise. President Trump is trimming the corporate fat, not murdering the agency.
Lest we forget, it was Ruckelshaus who, as head of the EPA, instituted the ban on DDT that is directly responsible for the deaths of over fifty million people worldwide. For more information read here, here, here, here and here (PDF file).
More on the budget cuts here at Anthony's: About those ‘devastating’ EPA budget reductions
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