Shitstain's Budget: Land & Water Conservation Fund Cut 95%; EPA Cut By 26%; NPS Loses $581 Million
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If you’re thinking that $4.7 billion sounds like an awful lot less than $900 million times 55 years, you’re not wrong. LWCF funding has been used as a political football throughout its history, and has only been fully funded twice. Note that the funding cap has not been adjusted for inflation, either. Congress allowed LWCF authorization to expire in 2018, so when President Trump signed the Dingell Act into law last year, re-authorizing the law and funding it with $484 million of offshore drilling lease money, he was rightly praised. Unfortunately, a fund is meaningless without funding. And the budget Trump is proposing for 2021 cuts $470 million from its bottom line, which would leave it with only $14.7 million to spend.
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That cut would eliminate 50 programs at the EPA, and reduce funding for many others. It would also slash the research and development budget for clean energy in half. Among the cut programs are efforts to eliminate the presence of lead in drinking water, and eliminate radon—a carcinogen—from homes. The changes also disproportionately affect traditionally Democrat-leaning states, while leaving battleground states alone. Projects protecting clean water in states like New York and Washington would be eliminated, while similar efforts in Florida go unmolested.
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The budget proposes a $581 million cut to NPS funding. The last time we got an update on that maintenance backlog was way back in 2018, when it stood at $11.9 billion. That was before the protracted government shutdown in which parks were left open, but unstaffed. The Department of the Interior, which oversees NPS, has yet to release a total for the damage incurred to parks during the shutdown, despite pressure from Congress to do so. As of 2018, the backlog was expanding at a rate of $313 million annually. Even if the proposed $314 million does reach parks infrastructure, it will only reduce the backlog by $1 million, or .008 percent of the 2018 total. And that does not account for damage that may result from those $581 million in budget cuts.
The budget does propose $300,000 in NPS funding for the boyhood home of Ronald Reagan, which has struggled financially in recent years.
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https://www.outsideonline.com/2409287/trump-white-house-2021-budget-environment#close