The White House is being guarded on the exact number of cuts the Environmental Protection Agency will suffer in the president’s fiscal 2018 budget proposal, except to say that it will see reductions with all other non-military agencies.
For the past month, reports have suggested that President Trump would take a $2 billion cleaver to the EPA’s $8.1 billion budget, gutting the agency’s climate programs and cutting 3,000 jobs from the agency’s 15,000-employee workforce.
More recent reports, however, suggested that the cuts could be much deeper, extending into the agency’s clean water program and other areas. New Administrator Scott Pruitt was thought to recommend keeping funds high for environmental cleanup programs. But that would be about it.
Pruitt is willing to give up funding for climate and other programs, which is expected to lead to steeper cuts beyond the initial $2 billion.
Now it appears the White House is willing to slash the agency by 31 percent, rather than the 24 percent cut that had been reported, according to the New York Times.
But White House officials told reporters on a call Wednesday that they will have to wait and see what those cuts would look like. And Congress has to approve Trump’s budget.
Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said the “budget blueprint” will offer a glimpse of what will lead to a full budget to be released in May.
The blueprint will have a total allocation for fiscal 2018, which will show how much Trump wants cut from the current budget, Mulvaney said. It won’t provide a line-by-line breakdown of how the cuts would be implemented across the agency’s offices, programs and bureaus.
“Ultimately, it will be up to Mr. Pruitt on how to implement those top-line numbers,” Mulvaney said.
“You will see reductions in the EPA. In fact, you’ll see reductions in many agencies as he tries to shrink the role of government,” he added.
But “we absolutely believe that the core functions of the EPA, beyond the core functions, can be satisfied by this budget,” Mulvaney said.
“We worked very hard with Mr. Pruitt, he has done a tremendous job at trying to prioritize things over at the EPA. And we worked with him on those priorities,” Mulvaney explained, while declining to discuss specific cuts and how many employees would lose their jobs.
“Regarding job reductions, you mentioned 3,000 people, I will tell you the same thing I told Mr. Pruitt, ‘we will work with you,’ which is a different process this year,” the official said. “Ordinarily, a president would come in and say, ‘you are going to spend this amount of money and you are going to take the reductions over there.’ That’s not how this president worked.
“We did set the top-line numbers, worked with some of the agencies on adjusting some of those numbers as they saw fit, but we’ve given them a tremendous amount of flexibility” on how the money gets spent, Mulvaney said.
