Trump Watch on the Environment and Excessive Housing Costs

Trump Watch on Environment
The EPA is poised to roll back the Obama-era efficiency standards. The agency threatens to revoke California's waiver under the Clean Air Act, which allow it to require cleaner cars.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke denies that his department censors science. A National Park Service report on how it will deal with climate change omits all references to human causation.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service doesn't want to give threatened species as much protection as endangered ones.

The Sierra Club's Environmental Law Program wins multiple court rulings: Now the BLM must disclose the climate impacts of fossil fuel development in the Powder River Basin; the Trump administration can't overturn the ban on new offshore oil and gas drilling in the Arctic without judicial review; and the administration can't delay increased penalties for automakers who violate fuel-economy standards.

Energy Secretary Rick Perry calls moving away from fossil fuels "immoral."

The Bureau of Land Management blames a "breakdown of technology" for its failure to note 42,000 public comments in support of protections for the greater sage-grouse.

"I really don't know" if humans cause climate change, says the head of the EPA's scientific advisory board.

Down for the Count
"Twenty percent of Californians live in hard-to-count areas like Fresno, where more than a quarter of all households failed to mail back their 2010 census forms, including a  third of Latinos and African Americans."

"After the 2010 census failed to count 1.5 million US residents of color, the government might have been expected to devote more resources to ensure an accurate count. Instead, in 2012 Congress told the Census Bureau,over the Obama White House's objections, to spend less money on the 2020 census than it had in 2010, despite inflation and the fact that the population was projected to grow by 25 million, After Trump took office, Congress cut the bureau's budget by another 10 percent and gave it no additional funding for 2018, even though the census typically receives a major cash infusion at this juncture to prepare for the decennial count." [1]

Excessive Housing Costs
"In Rochester ]New York] a midsize postindustrial city on Lake Ontario's southern shore, evidence of the [housing] crisis is everywhere. During the 2016-17 school year, the city school district reported that 8.8 percent of its students -- roughly 2,500 children -- were homeless at some point. Last year, some 3,510 eviction warrants were issued. More than 50 percent of tenants in the city are rent-burdened, meaning they spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing costs. And while Rochester stands out as the fifth-poorest city in the country, it is no anomaly." [2]

"On any given night, more than half a million homeless men, women, and children sleep on the streets or in shelters. In 2016 alone, according to research by the scholar Matthew Desmond, roughly 900,000 households were subject to eviction judgments. The same year, more than 11 million households spent at least 50 percent of their income, and another 9.8 million spent more than 30 percent, on rent. Nearly half of the nation's 43 million renting households, then, live with the crushing weight of excessive housing costs." [3]

ADDENDUM:
*The Pentagon is the only agency that cannot be audited or predict realistically when it  will do so. The Pentagon admits the problem and agrees it has a duty to pass an audit. The Pentagon's Office of the Comptroller wrote in 2008: "Our financial problems are pervasive and well documented."

Footnotes:
[1] "Down for the Count," Mother Jones, May/June 2018.

[2] Jimmy Tobias, "The Way Home," The Nation, June 18/25, 2018.

[3] Ibid.