Trump’s planet-hating EPA is cleaning up contaminated sites faster than Obama’s did

There are some fairly obvious reasons for this. One is that the Obama EPA’s mission was not really to protect the environment. It was to use environmental issues as an excuse to beat up the business community with lawsuits, investigations and regulatory delays. If you really want to clean things up, there’s a lot you can do and there’s money available to do it. The result of doing so successfully, which no Democrat ever wants, is that businesses can build, grow and expand. While the left/media wails about the Trump EPA wanting to trash the planet, what it’s actually doing is decidedly the opposite:

President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency has cleaned up more polluted or contaminated sites in less time and at a faster pace than the Obama administration did in all of 2015 and 2016, according to an analysis of government records by The Daily SIgnal. Wednesday marks the one-year anniversary of the EPA’s Superfund Task Force Report, which includes a list of 42 recommendations for federally funded cleanup efforts at hundreds of polluted and even toxic sites. An EPA press release highlights progress the agency has made in acting on the task force’s recommendations, including “more direct attention to the sites potentially eligible for partial or full deletion” from the federal Superfund list. Since Trump took office in January 2017, EPA officials have cleaned up all or part of 13 listed sites, compared with nine sites cleaned up by the Obama administration in 2015 and 2016. A total of 1,345 sites remain on the Superfund list, according to the EPA.

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Prior to Trump taking office, it wasn’t unusual for a single EPA employee to spend up to 15 years supervising the planned cleanup of a single Superfund site, which means your entire 30-year career could consist of cleaning up two sites. So how do you square the action-oriented approach of the Trump EPA with the agency’s employees howling and wailing that Trump was going to force them into a planet-hating agenda? You have to understand the mindset of the typical federal bureaucrat. Their purpose is not to solve problems. It’s to use the notion of problems to wield power over the private sector and/or other levels of government. These are the people who walk through an urban field that’s slated for development, spot a patch of mud and declare it a wetland that’s off-limits for building. You want them to change their position? It will usually cost you, not only your own attorney fees but often your willingness to create two or three new wetlands somewhere else in exchange for them letting you build on the mud puddle. And when contaminated sites are actually cleaned up, new factories, office parks and retail establishments can be built. Private sector investors can make money. People can get jobs, quite possibly non-unionized. All the things Democrats hate. So the EPA has long had no incentive to solve any of these problems. As long as the problems persist, they could use them to bring down the hammer on would-be developers and stand in the way of economic growth. The Trump Administration has forced the EPA to change its mission from wielding power to solving problems, which is antithetical to bureaucracies. But regular people tend to like it, assuming they ever hear about it. That’s why we’re telling you.