Trump budget calls for cutting Chesapeake Bay cleanup funds to zero

Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, VA)

March 16--Two weeks ago, when word leaked that the White House budget office had proposed slashing federal assistance for the Chesapeake Bay cleanup from $73 million a year to $5 million, environmental groups said they hoped the Trump administration would dial back the cuts.

On Thursday, they got a reality check in the form of a giant zero.

President Donald Trump's proposed 2018 budget is official, and it calls for putting not a single dollar into the bay cleanup.

"To be absolutely frank, we are in disbelief," Will Baker, president of the nonprofit Chesapeake Bay Foundation, said in a telephone conference with journalists Thursday. "If you eliminate the bay program, you slam the door on a recovery" of the nation's largest estuary -- "a recovery," he said, "which is still very fragile."

Dozens of environmental groups throughout the mid-Atlantic joined the foundation in lambasting the $1.1 trillion budget blueprint, which would boost funding for defense and border protection while cutting numerous other programs, from foreign aid to medical research. Conservationists said they were confident they'll find bipartisan support for rolling back much of what Trump has proposed on the environment, as the budget gets pored over in Congress.

Some of the deepest reductions would be at the Environmental Protection Agency, which oversees the bay cleanup. The EPA would lose nearly a third of its current $8.2 billion budget. Some environmental advocates warned that the enforcement of clean air and water laws would be greatly weakened and the agency's research on climate change would be all but eliminated.

Environmental initiatives at other agencies, including the Agriculture, Commerce and Interior departments, would be sliced. Monitoring of sea level rise, a major concern in Hampton Roads, would be undermined, according to a news release from Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine. And an international climate-observing system called CLARREO, based at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, would be wiped out, he said.

Administration officials defended the budget proposal, saying it addresses Americans' concerns about a government that has grown too large, inefficient and intrusive.

Baker argued, however, that the White House has discounted the effect that federal leadership has had on environmental improvements in the bay and elsewhere.

He called federal funding the "linchpin to all of the state and local efforts" and said it has acted as "an accelerator to other funds for saving the bay and improving the water quality in the rivers and streams that feed it."

Bay Foundation officials were unable Thursday to provide a breakdown of how much Virginia and the other five states in the bay watershed pay for cleanup efforts under the EPA-monitored "pollution diet" for the Chesapeake that began in 2010. But Donald Boesch, an honorary foundation trustee, said "the thought that we can easily go back and get the state governments to double or triple their investments to make up the difference is just naïve."

Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, said the states -- and the District of Columbia, which also is in the watershed -- face too many other budget demands, particularly related to health care.

About two-thirds of the $73 million federal appropriation this year for the bay cleanup is funneled to states and localities for specific pollution reduction projects, Baker said. That money covers a wide range of polluters, from farms to stormwater systems. Much of the remaining money goes into federally supervised water-quality monitoring.

In January, the foundation gave the bay its highest grade so far -- a C-minus -- in a scorecard it has been issuing since 1998. Improvements in conditions for blue crabs were a major reason for the change. Baker said further progress would be precarious, however, if federal oversight wanes.

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