Soon after Donald Trump took office as the President of the United States, his key advisor, Steve Bannon, described the new administration's plan for the "deconstruction of the administrative state." This was right in line with the goals of modern conservatism over the last three or four decades, of course, but the statement carried that certain Trumpian bull-in-a-China-shop finesse. So, too, has the philosophy as it's been put in practice. The Trump administration is tearing up regulations at a breakneck pace, transforming the Executive Branch and how it does business. Often, it’s with little regard to the established science or the effects these policies will have out in the country—except, that is, as it relates to maximizing corporate profits.

Undoubtedly, the United States federal government is home to bureaucratic inefficiencies and some waste, fraud, and abuse. But the deregulatory frenzy currently in progress will in many cases directly strip Executive Branch agencies of their ability to police corporate malfeasance and protect American lives.

Nowhere is that so apparent as the Environmental Protection Agency, which was dismantled in record time by the rise— and slow-motion downfall —of Scott Pruitt, American Plutocrat. The EPA has done an about-turn on any number of Obama-era policies, and the big ones stick out: The Clean Power Plan is the nation's primary means of meeting its obligations under the Paris Climate accords—obligations that take on new urgency with a terrifying report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change this week . The Trump administration has sought to roll the Plan back and, in the process, kneecap the world community in its fledgling efforts to address an existential crisis for human civilization.

The EPA has done an about-turn on any number of Obama-era policies

But there are also thousands of smaller casualties of this effort to dismantle the EPA. The Flint water crisis increasingly looks to have been a harbinger , not an aberration, something that will not improve with looser water standards. Some of the rollbacks have been almost comical, like the administration's twin moves—based on fringe science—to loosen restrictions on asbestos and small amounts of radiation exposure on the basis their threats to human health are overstated. And then there are the ordinary American victims—past, present, and future—of coal power generation, a dangerously dirty process given a new lease on life with the CPP's rollback, but which has been decimating small and powerless communities for decades.

Here is one such community: an area of Pennsylvania called Allegheny County that is home to a large coal power plant in the town of Springdale—and a mortality rate in some areas that's 87 percent above the national level . People in this little corner of the country get cancer, and they get asthma, and they get it early and often. They have no doubt about the cause. It is not a question of bureaucracy or environmentalism or liberty to them—it's life and death. This is a look at their story as the Trump administration moves to relax what regulations there still are on how the plant operates.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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