A top Republican senator said Thursday that President Trump’s massive cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency will keep the country’s environmental cop from “brainwashing” the country’s children.
Republican Senator @JimInhofe accuses the EPA of "brainwashing our kids" https://t.co/s5hq5fTJ5O— New Day (@NewDay) March 16, 2017
Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., said on CNN that fears about what the budget cuts will mean for the EPA’s ability to perform are unfounded. Trump has proposed a nearly 30 percent cut in the agency’s funding, or roughly $3 billion.
Inhofe said he trusted the people now in charge of the agency under Trump to keep it functioning.
“We want to deliver the services and we want to make things clean,” he said. “We’re going to [get rid of] all this stuff that comes out of the EPA that’s brainwashing our kids, that’s propaganda, that’s not true…”
Inhofe, the former chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, was a massive critic of the EPA under President Obama and is a noted climate change skeptic. He once brought a snow ball onto the Senate floor during a speech as an example of why the world isn’t actually warming.
The senior senator from Oklahoma said EPA supporters are naturally going to fight back against the cut by predicting doomsday scenarios for the agency because they want to protect as many employees as possible.
“It’s the nature of a bureaucracy if you cut their budget, then they’re going to try and take the things that are popular back home and cut those,” he said. “I would be concerned about that but now we have a different budget director at the EPA and he’s not going to let that happen.”
Inhofe said the EPA doesn’t need to be doing as much of the regulating of carbon dioxide as it wants to do because previous legislation passed in the early 1990s has worked.
“The Clean Air Act amendments were very successful,” he said. “All these things have worked. Our air is cleaner, pollution is down in spite of the fact that we drive twice as many miles.”
