WASHINGTON, D.C. -- To understand the radical changes underway at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, you could go to Portland Harbor, where Oregon officials and environmentalists worry a downsized agency won't have the muscle to enforce a billion-dollar cleanup of the Superfund site.

You could head to Puget Sound, where a National Estuary Program cleanup wholly dependent on the EPA could lose 100 percent of its funding.

But to really get a feel for the pro-industry revolution underway inside the nation's primary environmental watchdog, go to West, a town of 2,800 in sun-baked Texas. A 2013 explosion at a fertilizer plant flattened parts of the city, killing 15 people — 10 of them firefighters — and injuring 200 others. The volunteers had no idea that the tons of ammonium nitrate stored on site could explode.

The blast registered 2.1 on the Richter scale.

In response, the EPA early this year adopted new rules requiring plant owners to disclose the presence of dangerous chemicals to the locals and coordinate with emergency responders. The chemical industry objected, saying it was too expensive and potentially dangerous to force that kind of disclosure.

Late last month, with the Trump administration in charge, the EPA ditched the rule. "We want to prevent regulation created for the sake of regulation by the previous administration," said Scott Pruitt, the agency's new director.

President Donald Trump's first three months in office have been marked by high-profile legislative setbacks and policy flip-flops. But at EPA, he and Pruitt have been remarkably successful holding to their original vision of downsizing, defunding and defanging an agency they considered far out of step with its original mission.

"It's incredibly surreal," said Liz Purchia, a former communications director for the agency. "We're basically watching the Trump administration dismantle everything we tried to do. And we're seeing decisions based not on science but on what regulated industries want."

The culture war at EPA is not just an inside-the-beltway story. The 31 percent budget cut the administration envisions for the agency would create significant financial headaches at the state level.

Oregon's Department of Environmental Quality relies on the EPA for $30 million of its $351 million two-year budget. A cut of that size could force the layoffs of 32 positions. The Washington State Department of Ecology could lose more than $22 million and 46 jobs.

Pruitt, who declined multiple interview requests, minimizes the potential impact of the federal budget cuts, reasoning that states would step up to fill the funding gap. But most state environmental agencies, Oregon's included, are dependent on EPA for big percentages of their funding.

"We will see significant reductions at EPA that are going to cut into core protections of land, air and water," said Richard Whitman, head of Oregon's Department of Environmental Quality.

Don Benton's unlikely comeback

Pruitt, who famously filed 14 lawsuits against the EPA in his prior job as Oklahoma's attorney general, is not the only person environmentalists consider hostile to their cause who went to work for EPA.

The day after Trump's inauguration, Don Benton reported for duty as the agency's newly minted senior adviser to the White House. The same Don Benton who consistently earned some of the lowest environmental ratings of any Washington state lawmaker when he represented Vancouver. Benton's hiring as the head of Clark County's environmental services department was so controversial it helped spawned a successful grassroots campaign to amend the county charter. He was later laid off after his job was eliminated.

Benton denies that he's anti-environment. "I've got two boys who are Eagle Scouts," he said. "I'm very conservation minded."

Benton was an early believer in Trump, heading his presidential campaign in the state. After his surprise victory, Benton was tapped to run Trump's beachhead team at the EPA. Doug Ericksen, one of the few Washington legislators with lower environmental rankings than Benton, also served on Trump's transition team at the agency.

It was a remarkable turnaround. Less than a year since his forced departure from Clark County, Benton was advising the new president and earning nearly $180,000-a-year.

"He put all his chips on Trump early, and he's been able to run the table since then," said Mark Stephan, a political science professor at Washington State University in Vancouver. "It speaks to his acumen, that other people didn't take him seriously when they should have."

But where Stephan saw a shrewd politician with a talent for landing on his feet, environmentalists saw foxes being put in charge of the henhouse.

"Benton and Ericksen are climate change deniers who've consistently voted against clean air and clean water protections for communities across the state," said Shannon Murphy, president of Washington Conservation Voters. "It's disappointing to see the new administration continue to hire people who are opponents of the very agency they're running."

Rescind and replace

The president and Pruitt got to work rat-a-tat rescinding or putting on hold Obama-era rules and regulations.

On Feb. 28, Trump issued an executive order instructing the EPA to rescind or revise the Waters of the United States rule, an ambitious water-quality program.

A month later, Pruitt signed an order denying a petition that sought to ban chlorpyrifos, a pesticide crucial to U.S. agriculture that has been linked to brain damage in children.

The agency put the chemical plant disclosure rules on hold March 31. Too burdensome on business, Pruitt said.

Plans to tighten water effluence emission standards for steam-powered electric plants were suspended on April 13. Too expensive, Pruitt said.

In the midst of it all, the White House released its budget calling for a 31 percent budget cut at EPA, which would require eliminating more than 3,000 jobs.

The new-era EPA's red-letter day came March 28.

Traffic around the so-called Federal Triangle was a mess as D.C. police blocked cars and pedestrians in all directions for the presidential motorcade making its way to EPA headquarters.

As coal miners cheered, Trump signed an executive order killing the agency's Clean Power Plan, a sweeping Obama-era initiative to reduce carbon pollution from the nation's power plants.

Many EPA insiders considered the Clean Power Plan one of the agency's proudest achievements, an overdue attempt to reckon with climate change. Conservative critics ripped the plan, claiming it was bureaucratic overreach at its worst. Pruitt had sued to block the plan while he was attorney general of Oklahoma.

Myron Ebell, a long-time climate change skeptic at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., applauded the move. The Baker City native, who served on Trump's transition team and worked briefly with Benton, said he sympathizes with EPA employees who feel adrift within the agency. But the agency got too big and wandered too far from its core mission, he said.

"Environmentalists typically say EPA is a minute part of the overall budget and cutting its funding won't fix anything," Ebell said. "That's true. But if you take away 3,200 people, that's 3,200 people who can't be writing new regulations. So I think it's money well cut."

Pacific Northwest consolidation

By mid-April, rumors of more cuts were flying. EPA's Region 10 office in Seattle would be consolidated into the agency's Denver office, according to the grapevine.

Benton moved on. Trump nominated him to head the Selective Service System, which registers young men for the military draft. Benton said published reports that he was on the outs with Pruitt and his senior staff were inaccurate.

"Republicans believe in rigorous discussions, and we had many of them," he said. "The press loves to characterize it as in-fighting and it's just not the case."

The historic changes at the EPA come just as the agency finalized an agreement to clean up the lower Portland Harbor. Travis Williams of Willamette Riverkeeper and Whitman, of the state Department of Environmental Quality, worry the deal, a decade in the making, could go off the rails if the EPA lacks the staffing to handle enforcement.

Private parties and insurance companies are furnishing most of the estimated $1 billion that will pay for dredging the contaminated river-bottom and capping it afterward. But the federal agency has always been in charge.

"If the EPA budget gets axed to the degree they're talking about," Williams said, "that's when you worry about the the agency having the adequate bandwidth to manage the cleanup."

Whitman has similar qualms. His department relies on federal funding, as does just about every state environmental agency.

Sen. Jeff Merkley and some of his fellow liberal Democrats in the Senate fought against Pruitt's appointment. Merkley hoped the Senate would withhold approval at least until they could further explore the ties between Pruitt and the oil and gas industry when he was Oklahoma's attorney general. It didn't happen.

"Now, you've got a bunch of guys going into an agency with a monkeywrench and loosening all the bolts," Merkley said.

Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, D-Oregon, is pessimistic about the agency's future. As a member of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, she's had to sit through countless hearings on climate change. An environmental agency is in a difficult spot, she said, when the new president claims climate change is a Chinese hoax and the lawmakers who hold the purse strings can't agree on whether it's real.

"Climate change should not be a partisan issue," Bonamici said. "But I'm not hopeful it's going to get better, not with an EPA administrator hostile to the cause."

In tiny West, Texas, meanwhile, nearly four years have passed since the explosion. Though the town is located deep in Red America, Mayor Tommy Muska said there are times the people need government intervention.

"I'm not for over-regulating businesses," Muska said. But "if chemical manufacturers will not voluntarily identify dangers and share that knowledge, then government must require them to do so. If that doesn't happen, we'll see another tragedy like the explosion in West."

-- Jeff Manning

503-294-7606, jmanning@oregonian.com