MAKE AMERICA TOXIC AGAIN

The Environmental Protection Agency has frozen all new grants and contracts and barred its employees from talking about it with the press or public.

That's according to reports from ProPublica and The Huffington Post as well as information passed anonymously from EPA staff to Business Insider.

Business Insider reached out to the EPA to confirm the reports, as well as a report that President Donald Trump has barred the EPA from funding its own science, but did not immediately receive a response.

The EPA's core mission is to protect Americans from poisons and other dangers in their air, water, and soil. Much of that work happens through private contractors hired by the EPA for services like water-quality testing and cleanups.

With all new grants and contracts frozen, it's unclear how work will continue. Here's what still a mystery:

Does the freeze affect the $6.4 billion in active contracts the EPA already has in place?
Is the freeze indefinite or temporary?
Should we expect a shift in the kinds of projects the EPA takes on or how it handles them?
The Trump administration apparently doesn't intend to answer those questions yet.

EPA employees reportedly received a memo from a member of the agency staff instructing them not to talk to the press or public. It bars employees from issuing press releases, sharing information on agency social media, blogging, putting new information on the agency website, or sending messages on agency listservs, because those messages might leak to the public.

appaloosa horse wrote:hope you guys don't mind them young pollutants in your water or burning rivers because that's the sort of shit that used to happen in america without the EPA

Tyson wrote:american sea 2032

U.S. President Donald Trump's administration has instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to remove the climate change page from its website, two agency employees told Reuters, the latest move by the newly minted leadership to erase ex-President Barack Obama's climate change initiatives.

The employees were notified by EPA officials on Tuesday that the administration had instructed EPA's communications team to remove the website's climate change page, which contains links to scientific global warming research, as well as detailed data on emissions. The page could go down as early as Wednesday, the sources said.

"If the website goes dark, years of work we have done on climate change will disappear," one of the EPA staffers told Reuters, who added some employees were scrambling to save some of the information housed on the website, or convince the Trump administration to preserve parts of it.

appaloosa horse wrote:https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/861?r=5

some jackass representing the florida panhandle has decided to make a bill to straight up end the EPA either because he's fucking stupid or because he wants attention