100 Days of Environmental Rollbacks and Attacks on our Democracy

100 Days of Environmental Rollbacks and Attacks on our Democracy
The President’s illegal and unconstitutional actions threaten the health of all Americans

[SANTA FE] – April 29th marks the 100th day of the Trump Administration. In that time, the President has taken a series of unprecedented actions across all areas of the administration. Some of the most significant anti-climate and anti-conservation actions include: 

• Declaring a national energy emergency to open up federal lands to fossil fuel energy production, and invoke “alternative” review processes to eliminate effective public comment under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and Endangered Species Act (ESA). 
• Ordering the US Attorney General to stop the enforcement of any state and local laws, rules and policies deemed to be a burden on mining and fossil fuel production 
• Announcing plans to roll back 31 environmental actions, including the “Endangerment Finding” that used overwhelming scientific evidence to document that greenhouse gas emissions are causing climate change and can be regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) 
• Declaring a national emergency as the basis for implementing emergency ESA and NEPA provisions to open vast acreage to timber harvesting that bypass standard reviews and public comments 
• Dismissing the entire National Climate Assessment Team, hundreds of scientists, that prepares a comprehensive, Congressionally-mandated, report on how rising temperatures affect human health, agriculture, fisheries, water supplies, transportation, energy production and other aspects of the US economy
• Withholding federal funding, including grants issued under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and disaster relief dollars 
• Slashing funding and scrubbing language from department and agency websites related to issues such as climate change, environmental justice, and diversity
• Laying off staff vital to serving low-income families and communities, including employees of the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, national parks workers, and forest service employees. 

Additionally, the Trump Administration has moved forward with strategies that directly harm communities most impacted by climate change, including LGBTQ+, low-income families, and immigrants. In response, CVNM Chief Executive Officer Demis Foster issued the following statement: 

“The Trump Administration has declared war on public lands, public health, and our land, air, water and wildlife. This government has resorted to declaring a series of fictitious emergencies to justify actions that the large majority of the public and even some federal and state elected officials in his own party oppose. We are in danger of returning to a time before the passage of landmark bipartisan environmental and public health protections starting in the late 1950s and 1960s, like the Wilderness Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the bipartisan creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, which will threaten the lives of millions of Americans. 

We are facing the prospect of a disastrous decline in air and water quality and access to public lands, impacting public health but also wildlife and the many mostly rural jobs that depend on outdoor recreation. The Trump government is leaving vastly under-resourced state and local governments on their own to attempt to respond to extreme weather events, while also deregulating climate pollution caused by fossil fuel production and use in transportation, manufacturing and agriculture. 

The endless and unconstitutional actions of this President are the acts of an increasingly authoritarian government determined to dismantle our democracy and environmental protections. We view these acts as a call to action: our state elected and appointed leaders must be bold and swift in their work to protect our families, our communities, and our environment from the harms of these policy decisions.” 

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