White House proposes massive EPA budget cuts

(Image credit: Aude Guerrucci-Pool/Getty Images)

published 28 February 2017

A day after reportedly proposing massive cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency's budget, the White House is expected to move forward Tuesday with an executive order undoing the Obama-era rule Waters of the United States. Though Trump's order rolling back the rule protecting America's major waterways would have "almost no immediate legal effect," The New York Times noted it will "essentially give Mr. Trump a megaphone to direct his Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Scott Pruitt, to begin the process of rewriting" the 2015 regulation.

On Monday, the White House sent another message to Pruitt with a proposal that reportedly suggested cutting a quarter of the EPA's budget and "eventually eliminating 1 in 5 of the agency's workers," Politico reported. The proposed cuts, which one person told Politico were "far more severe than anyone imagined," would lower the EPA's budget to its lowest level since 1991, and leave the EPA the most sparsely staffed it's been since the mid-1980s. The White House did not confirm the figures.