Trump's plan for the economy: Make Drinking Water Dirty Again
Source: Washington Post
Trump’s plan for the economy: Make Drinking Water Dirty Again
By Catherine Rampell
Columnist
September 12, 2019 at 7:03 p.m. EDT
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As a case study, take the administration’s decision Thursday to formally repeal a rule that granted expanded federal oversight of U.S. waterways. We are reverting to water-pollution standards from 1986 — a year from Trump’s favorite decade, which was not exactly a high-water mark, so to speak, for environmental protections.
For context, this is one of many deregulatory actions Trump has taken to allow more pollution. Others include allowing power plants to dump more lead, arsenic and mercury into the water; relaxing restrictions on the release of methane and fine particulate matter into the air; and legalizing a pesticide linked to brain damage in children.
This latest case involved the bodies of water the federal government can protect under the Clean Water Act, which makes it illegal to pollute a “water of the United States” without a permit. An Obama administration rule clarified that “waters of the United States” include streams and wetlands that feed larger waterways, including those used for drinking water. The government cost-benefit analysis it produced at the time found that this rule produced net economic benefits.
The Trump administration’s cost-benefit analysis, however, came to the opposite conclusion — chiefly because it abruptly decided that the largest category of benefits previously attributed to the rule could no longer be quantified at all. (The Trump administration said the research that had been used to quantify the benefits of protecting wetlands was too old, even though it cited even older research elsewhere in the same report.)
Therefore, these benefits were effectively assigned a value of zero. Voila, the rule must go
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