Editor’s note: This commentary is by Elayne Clift, who writes about women, culture and social issues from Saxtons River.
[S]everal months ago, I wrote a column about the fact that Donald Trump’s increasingly wild and disturbing public appearances and tweets were keeping important international stories from being reported. Recently the SCOTUS and Rosenstein debacles obscured in-depth news reports about the havoc Trump and his entourage are creating domestically as they demolish decades of progress relating to everything from climate change to civil and human rights. Here are examples of policy travesties that desperately need attention.
Despite warnings from climate researchers, even within government agencies like the USDA, CIA, and the Department of Homeland Security, appointees still don’t believe in science as they continue to promulgate dangerous policies and carry out ineffective practices ranging from disaster prevention and relief to failures in national security.
The EPA leads the way. It has withdrawn or weakened a large number of climate regulations while other agencies have tried to cancel rules designed to limit oil and gas industry’s methane pollution. The EPA is also working overtime to roll back legislation like the Toxic Substances Control Act, updated by President Obama. That act was intended to give the federal government more power to regulate dangerous chemicals. The current administration wants to make it impossible to determine the harmful effects of any chemicals in the U.S. It also wants to bring back asbestos, which is so toxic it is now banned in 55 countries.
At the Interior Department, as Politico has noted, “Decisions about Pacific island territories threatened by rising seas are in the hands of an assistant secretary who has criticized ‘climate alarmists’ for ‘predicting the end of the world.’” One top adviser, a former talk radio host, has dismissed climate research as “junk science” while fires and floods rage across America and coastal cities and towns are predicted to be unlivable within our lifetimes. Climate change issues have been taken down from government websites, scientists have been removed from advisory boards, greenhouse gas regulations have been repudiated and the U.S. is now the only nation on Earth to reject the 2015 Paris Agreement on Global Warming.
Education? Among her other dangerously misguided efforts, Betsy DeVos has tried to impose stricter standards for students defrauded by for-profit colleges to qualify for relief on federal loans by requiring students to prove that for-profit institutions knowingly misled them or acted with “reckless disregard for the truth.” DeVos has staffed her department with former for-profit college executives so it’s no surprise that predatory behavior in the for-profit education industry appears to be on the rise. And that’s just for starters.
At HUD, Ben Carson has failed to enforce the 50-year-old Fair Housing Act, for which he is being sued by the National Fair Housing Alliance among others. He has also sought congressional approval to hike rents on people living in federally subsidized housing, with a planned increase of more than 300 percent; he claims the rent hikes will incentivize public housing tenants to seek work.
Meanwhile, at the Department of Health and Human Services, a Conscience and Religious Freedom Division is now part of the HHS Office for Civil Rights. It effectively means the federal department, whose mission is to “enhance and protect the health and well-being of all Americans,” will make it easier for health care providers to discriminate against Americans, like LGBT and transgender people. The administration also wants to rename DHHS and call it the Department of Health and Public Welfare, and to move the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program known as SNAP, and the WIC program to the newly named agency. All of this would mean cuts to those safety net programs.
Then there’s women’s health. The Trump administration is methodically attempting to remake government policy on reproductive health. It wants to limit access to birth control and abortion while promoting abstinence-only sex education, which has proven to be ineffective and dangerous. Proposed rules and regulations, like forbidding federally funded family planning clinics from referring women for abortions, or allowing employers to opt out of no-cost birth control for women workers, are based on misguided ideologies that punish women and those who provide their health care, putting many women at serious risk and denying them privacy and autonomy. Changes to Title X, the family-planning program, could force out Planned Parenthood and other providers that deal with a wide range of women’s health services for over four million low-income people, mainly women who could find themselves without routine care or access to contraceptives.
Another alarming development is that the National Guideline Clearinghouse, a federal database that helps doctors answer medical questions for both physicians and lay people, has been taken offline, the latest casualty in the administration’s determination to eliminate science from its agenda. The site costs about $1.2 million a year, about the amount Tom Price spent on travel during his tenure as secretary of HHS.
All of this is tip of the iceberg, no matter which agency is involved. It’s alarming and it’s nearly invisible. Clearly the media needs air time to keep us informed. If such travesties remain unchecked, imagine the repercussions, and how long it would take to erase them.
