Trump's Plans for Protecting Polluters Have Been a Devastating Success

[babylonsister]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/05/trump-bannon-administrative-state-epa-rosenstein-polluters-win.html

Trump’s Plans for Protecting Polluters Have Been a Devastating Success

By Mekela Panditharatne
May 10, 2019
4:21 PM


In the first days of the Donald Trump presidency, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon famously described the administration’s plans for the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” Despite the constant apparent chaos in parts of the West Wing, Trump officials throughout the executive branch have lived up to this promise to use bureaucratic tools to throttle federal law enforcement of polluters and corporations with an almost zealous meticulousness.

Across the Trump administration, top agency officials have been busy building a bureaucratic scaffolding to stymie federal enforcement actions against the nation’s wealthiest and most powerful players. Officials in the Justice Department, Environmental Protection Agency, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, among others, have been moving to muzzle agencies’ fact-finding powers, add layers of bureaucratic control, complicate chains of command, and strip power from regional officers and enforcement specialists. The result has been historic declines in enforcement actions against banks, corporations, and corporate executives—precisely as Bannon promised.

The Trump administration has more than lived up to that initial slashing tone. Through its tenure, the administration has ramped up immigration enforcement, while presiding over a precipitous drop in enforcement of environmental and civil rights laws, and of regulating corporate crime. For polluters and corporations, the administration has doled out a handful of meager reprisals, wielding bureaucratic tools such as memoranda and fortified top-down structures to chill agencies’ enforcement powers.

Across the agencies, enforcement actions against polluters, banks, and corporations have dwindled. The Environmental Protection Agency collected a mere $69 million in civil and administrative penalties from polluters in 2018, the lowest amount levied by the agency in more than a decade. Criminal fines collected by the EPA from polluters plunged to $88 million, the lowest total for such penalties assessed in a decade. In 2018, EPA referred the fewest new criminal cases to the Justice Department in any year since 1988.

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All administrations shuffle enforcement priorities, and some observers have posed contextual quibbles over the data documenting the decline. But the overall scale at which the Trump administration is pulling back on enforcement actions against corporate actors, banks, and polluters would be shocking under any other administration. As fewer cases gestate within the agencies’ ranks, companies will be emboldened to violate with greater impunity laws meant to protect public health, safety, and financial well-being. That’s bad news for all of us.

[onethatcares]

1. Gee, guess who was president in 1988

that addled movie actor from California.

why am I not surprised? The earth is getting ready for our die off, I feel sorry for my grandkids.