How can he hurt us? He’s far away, in Washington or Mar-a-Lago. Let us count the ways.
Last week, President Donald Trump continued his assault on the environment by visiting the headquarters of the EPA to sign an executive order gutting the Obama administration’s effort to comply with the Paris climate change accords. The New York Times described the event this way: “Mr. Trump made clear that the United States had no intention of meeting the commitments that his predecessor had made to curb planet-warming carbon dioxide pollution, turning denials of climate change into national policy.”
Trump, who has no apparent understanding of the issues involved, issued his order to lift limits on carbon emissions, primarily from power plants, ostensibly to spur a return to fossil fuels like coal. To the extent he succeeds, New Hampshire, which is downwind of the biggest, oldest and most polluting of those power plants, will pay the price.
Also last week, this paper published a column by Dr. Elizabeth Cramer, a pediatrician. She wrote about the many ways air pollution and the warming of the climate affects her patients. It’s meant more people, especially more children, with asthma, more cases of tick-borne Lyme disease, more concern over mosquito bites once considered merely a nuisance.
Trump or (since he likely knows virtually nothing about the targets of his budget cuts) a staff drawn from the ideological extremes, wants to take an ax to a range of federal programs that aid New Hampshire. Not just Meals on Wheels, even Trump must know what that is, but agencies that help inform the public, aid people and make the University of New Hampshire a national leader in environmental research.
Potentially on the block are federal funds for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, money that pays for the University of New Hampshire’s Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and Space. Ditto for funding of the university’s Sea Grant program and other efforts to understand, preserve and protect Great Bay and the state’s estuaries. They are among the most pristine and productive sources of marine life on the East Coast. Seventy percent of the funding used to protect estuaries like Great Bay comes from the federal government.
The president’s proposed 31 percent reduction in the EPA’s budget would limit the state’s ability to protect its air and water and hurt efforts to protect people from things like arsenic and radon in New Hampshire’s drinking water.
America’s land, water and air are not all that’s in the cross hairs of Trump’s team of small-government zealots led by budget director Mick Mulvaney, a former South Carolina congressman and co-founder of the Freedom Caucus. Gone could be funding for the nation’s 21st Century Community Learning Centers, after-school programs that Mulvaney wrongly claims have demonstrated no educational value. Concord has six of them. Gone, funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Northern Border Regional Commission, which aids economic development in places like Coos County. Trump’s cuts would also mean little or no money for the Legal Services Corporation, the major source of legal help for low-income citizens.
Like his abortive effort to replace the Affordable Care Act with a plan that would have taken health insurance away from 24 million Americans, Trump’s proposed budget is too radical to win much support. It is doomed.
The Trump team now plans to simultaneously take on tax reform and infrastructure repair. The latter task has broad bipartisan support, but it too will be doomed if Trump’s tax reform plan is as mean-spirited as his plans for health care and the budget.