The Energy 202: Trump wants to Make the Great Lakes great again
In recent weeks, President Donald Trump has begun honing his message on the environment for his 2020 reelection bid.
It amounts to this: Make the Great Lakes great again.
Both with the presidential bully pulpit and through the White House budget office, Trump has been teeing up the argument that he is a champion for the Great Lakes and the Everglades. Those treasured bodies of water are in or adjacent to key swing states he needs to win to be reelected.
They include not only the Great Lakes - which collectively border
Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, states Trump won in 2016 by less than 80,000 votes altogether - but also the Everglades in the perennial swing state of Florida.
"It's certainly part of Republicans' plan to carry Florida," said Susan MacManus, a professor emerita of political science at the University of South Florida, who for years ran a poll of Floridians' policy preferences.
But that presidential support doesn't extend to similar programs protecting bodies of water off the coasts of solidly blue states, leading to charges from environmental critics of political favoritism for pro-Trump constituencies.
"Donald Trump is like a mafia don, using government to punish his perceived political enemies, and doling out gifts to states from whom he wants to buy votes in next year's election," charged Tom Pelton, author of the book "The Chesapeake in Focus" about the cleanup of one of those overlooked bodies of water, the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland and Virginia.
The Trump campaign, for its part, is already incorporating the funding commitments into its messaging.
"As predecessors before him eliminated funding for important environmentally based initiatives like the Great Lakes Restoration Act, President Trump has made funding a priority," said Erin Perrine, Trump's deputy communications director.
And the president is testing his Everglades message to Florida voters on Twitter: "My Administration will be fighting for $200 million for the Army Corps Everglades restoration work this year. Congress needs to help us complete the world's largest intergovernmental watershed restoration project ASAP! Good for Florida and good for the environment."
For the past three years, the White House has submitted to Congress requests to slash - or at times, eliminate - federal funding contributions to the cleanup efforts of various regional waterways, including Puget Sound along the northwestern coast of Washington and Long Island Sound between New York and Connecticut.
Even when Republicans controlled the House, the requests were dead on arrival. But they sent the message to fiscal conservatives that Trump was committed to trimming federal spending.
The programs for the Great Lakes and Everglades found themselves in the budget-clipping crosshairs of the White House, too. But this week, the White House amended its official budget proposal to add $270 million and $137 million back to the Great Lakes and South Florida programs, respectively.
The change of heart came after a sustained lobbying effort from Midwestern and Florida members of Congress to restore waterway-related money flowing into their districts.
Since 2017, a bipartisan coalition of Midwestern members has peppered Trump and White House Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney with letters urging them to support spending more money on the recovery of the Great Lakes, which for years had been plagued by industrial pollution from Rust Best factories.
"Unfortunately, I've had to fight for adequate resources for this important program ever since I got to Congress, as both the Obama and Trump administrations proposed cuts to it in past budget requests," Rep. Dave Joyce (R-Ohio) said, referring to Obama administration proposals that called for cuts to Great Lakes spending as well.
That effort culminated in March when Trump told a crowd in Grand Rapids, Mich. - the last stop of his 2016 campaign - that he would fully fund the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, contradicting his 2020 budget proposal that called for a 90 percent cut to the program.
"I support the Great Lakes. Always have. They're beautiful. They're big. Very deep. Record deep," he said.
A day later, while touring Florida's Lake Okeechobee, which flows into the Everglades, members of the state's congressional delegation, including Republicans Rep. Francis Rooney and GOP Sen. Marco Rubio, pressed Trump to keep funding high for water infrastructure at and around the lake.
The lake's Herbert Hoover Dike, for example, is badly in need of repairs that would allow the Army Corps of Engineers to keep water levels high in the lake and reduce the need to discharge into the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee estuaries. That polluted water contributes to algae blooms that can cripple Florida's beachgoing economy.
In front of reporters, Rubio suggested Trump could "go down in history as the 'Everglades President.' "
"The Everglades is very important and very important to me," Trump said in response while standing in front of the lake.
Rooney, whose southwest Florida district is near the 1.5 million-acre Everglades National Park, said the president's commitment this week to fund Everglades restoration projects should do him some good in the polls there in 2020.
"It's one more instance of the president doing what he said he would do when he was campaigning," Rooney said, referring to Trump's promise in 2016 to make the Everglades a priority.
Washington's Puget Sound never received such a commitment from Trump. But it faces some of the same problems with the buildup of toxic chemicals in the water, which imperil fish and marine mammals as they accumulate it in their bodies. The state's governor wants to spend more than a $1 billion on recovery for the sound's iconic orcas, even going so far as to propose a partial ban on whale watching.
Trump's budget proposals, however, would eliminate federal contributions to restoration.
"Puget Sound is not different than the Chesapeake or the Everglades in terms of its importance to our economy or to our regions' identities," said Rep. Derek Kilmer, D-Wash. "This isn't a partisan issue."
By: Dino Grandoni
Source: Washington Post