MILWAUKEE—If I lean the right way and look out my hotel window, I can see Lake Michigan, shining cold in the noonday sun. When I lived here, I spent a lot of time wandering the bluffs and the docks along the lake. (I once saw the Edmund Fitzgerald pass by a few years before she sank in Lake Superior.) It is very easy to fall in love with the grandeur and power of the Great Lakes. Each of them has its own unique character; Gordon Lightfoot wasn't too far wrong in that one verse where he anthropomorphized each of them.

The lakes carried the raw materials to the factories and mills and carried the finished products out of them. They serviced factories in Michigan, coal companies in Pennsylvania, and machine shops in Wisconsin. (Those three states were not mentioned by accident, as we will see.) They remain a mighty engine for tourism. They are the very bloodstream that gives life to this country's bone and sinew.

Of course, all that industry pretty much fouled the lakes for a lot of years. But a herculean effort beginning with the environmental movement of the 1970s managed to save the lakes from complete degradation. (Millions of people in the United States and Canada get their drinking water from the lakes, courtesy of the Great Lakes Compact. In fact, it was switching from that water to a local river that started the cascade of catastrophe in Flint.)

This effort probably reached its apex in 2011, when the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative was enacted. It set aside $475 million in 2011 and $300 million in 2012 to send to local groups working on everything from toxic cleanups to the fight against invasive species. (Make no mistake: We are at war with the Quagga mussel and the Round Goby.) These efforts were roundly applauded by the people living around all the lakes.

Wait for it.

From MLive:

The proposal would virtually eliminate annual Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI) funding, slashing it from $300 million to $10 million among other cuts that would altogether reduce the EPA's total budget by a quarter. Specific program cuts were reported by the Oregonian and have been confirmed by other news agencies like the Detroit Free Press. The Trump administration says it will release its final budget the week of March 13. The EPA and State Department are expected to take major blows to meet Trump's goal of increasing military spending by 10 percent. The EPA has the option to appeal the cuts before the budget is sent to Congress, but has not yet made any public statements about a counter proposal.

So the last hope for the Initiative rests in the hands of noted environmentalist Scott Pruitt. Lovely.

The Great Lakes funding cut is the largest total dollar reduction on a list that includes major cuts to climate change programs, restoration funding for Puget Sound and Chesapeake Bay, research into chemicals that disrupt human reproductive and developmental systems, enforcement of pollution laws and funding for Brownfield cleanups. The plan also includes a $13 million cut in compliance monitoring, which the EPA uses to ensure the safety of drinking water systems. State grants for beach water quality testing would also be eliminated. "When you see these reductions, you'll be able to tie it back to a speech the President gave, or something the President had said previously," Mick Mulvaney, administration budget director, said at a White House press briefing Monday. "We are taking his words and turning them into policies and dollars."

Mulvaney's a Tea Party dope, so I expect very little from him, or from the administration he has been hired to serve. What I do know is that this president* wants $54 billion more for his defense department and, to get it, he's going to allow America to get its ass kicked by the Quagga mussel. Making America Great Again? Not by a damn sight. I hope the economically insecure voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania manage to live with this.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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