The Environmental Protection Agency plans to let the lease on its state-of-the-art Houston laboratory expire in 2020. And nobody at the agency is saying whether space for the laboratory will be leased somewhere else in Houston or nearby or even whether the lab itself will continue at all. Environmental advocates and labor union officials are not happy. They have reportedly been meeting with members of the Texas congressional delegation in hopes of keeping the lab running.
Houston’s Region 6 Environmental Services Laboratory, one of 10 regional EPA labs, serves a five-state region. Much of the work of the 50 chemists, biologists and other staff at the lab has been focused on Superfund sites in the region. In Harris County where Houston is, there are 13 such sites, many of which were flooded during Hurricane Harvey.
The lab has been a staging area since Harvey struck, and a scientist there told the Houston Chronicle that the staff was told they would be doing water testing during the long recovery from the massive storm. But closing the lab would mean water and soil samples would either have to be sent to another EPA lab—the closest is 400 miles away in Ada, Oklahoma—or to private contractors.
An EPA official confirmed to a Chronicle reporter that the lab’s lease is being allowed to expire. But he also said that the American Federation of Government Employees’ concern that the lab’s work will be ended is overwrought, noting that “alternatives that will continue to provide the analytical services to support our mission critical work in the Dallas office.” The Chronicle’s Matt Lambrecht reports:
Clovis Steib, an EPA employee and the union president in the Dallas region, said in an interview that EPA officials told him in April about the decision to close the lab.
“The sobering news given to me was that in 2019 they would start tying together loose ends and in 2020 the facility would close because they are not going to renew the lease. They would shutter it. And people there wonder, of course, what does that mean for me?”
The EPA recently offered buyouts to 12 people at the lab; three of them accepted the packages, Steib said.
The Trump regime proposed cutting the EPA’s overall budget by 31 percent. But while that slash-and-burn approach has been scaled back in congressional committee, the $8.2 billion budget is still slated for major cuts, even though it’s at its lowest level in 16 years, and staffing is at its lowest level since 1989. The cuts are in part to cover for the $54 billion the regime seeks to add to the Pentagon’s budget.
Extremist Republicans would like to eliminate the EPA altogether, but that’s not politically palatable even in the Trump era. Hollowing-out the agency, however, can wreck it while keeping its name over the door. Elected officials and the executive branch can thus pretend the agency is still doing all it can to protect people and the environment.
This methodical, death-by-a-thousand-little-cuts approach instead of trying to crush the agency all at once is exactly what environmental advocacy groups and progressive lawmakers warned about when Scott Pruitt was announced as Donald Trump’s choice to run the EPA.