April 16, 2020 Trump Rolls Back Mercury Standards Amid Pandemic

By Amit Narang

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The middle of a pandemic is hardly the time for the Trump administration to be putting the finishing touches on its corrupt, partisan agenda of rolling back regulations that protect our health and environment. But that’s exactly what the administration is doing.

Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized another harmful and dangerous environmental rollback – this time to gut the standards put in place under the Obama administration to protect the public, particularly pregnant women and children, from exposure to the deadly neurotoxin mercury.

In a little over a week, the EPA has gutted the clean car fuel efficiency standards, rejected a safer soot pollution standard and now reversed its own authority to regulate mercury.

Shockingly, all three of these actions will lead to more much more of the same air pollution that a recent Harvard study linked to increased mortality from the coronavirus.

These rollbacks all fly in the face of scientific consensus and will hurt American consumers and our economy, according to the EPA’s own cost-benefit analyses.

The Trump administration must stop its partisan agenda of slashing safeguards while the public is fighting the coronavirus and must heed the growing, bipartisan calls to focus only on new regulations that are directly related to the pandemic.