Even someone as beholden to lobbyists as Trump is should understand the dangerous effect that chemicals have on our wildlife and human beings themselves.
This sequence of events is detailed in more than 84,000 pages of Interior Department and Environmental Protection Agency documents obtained via Freedom of Information requests by The New York Times and, separately, by the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group that sued the federal government to force it to complete the pesticide studies.
The documents provide a case study of how the Trump administration has been using its power to second-guess or push aside conclusions reached by career professionals, particularly in the area of public health and the environment.
The decision to block the release of the report represented a victory for the pesticide industry, which has industry allies and former executives sprinkled through the administration. Among those with the most at stake were Dow AgroSciences, a manufacturer of chlorpyrifos, which is used on dozens of fruits and vegetables, and FMC Corporation, a manufacturer of malathion, which is used against mosquitoes as well as chewing and sucking insects that attack a range of crops including tomatoes, strawberries and walnuts.
Dow, which was recently renamed Corteva, donated $1 million to Mr. Trump’s inauguration committee. E.P.A. and Interior Department records show that top pesticide industry executives had regular access to senior agency officials, pressing them to reconsider the way the federal government evaluates the threat pesticides cause to endangered species.
This sequence of events is detailed in more than 84,000 pages of Interior Department and Environmental Protection Agency documents obtained via Freedom of Information requests by The New York Times and, separately, by the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group that sued the federal government to force it to complete the pesticide studies.
The documents provide a case study of how the Trump administration has been using its power to second-guess or push aside conclusions reached by career professionals, particularly in the area of public health and the environment.
The decision to block the release of the report represented a victory for the pesticide industry, which has industry allies and former executives sprinkled through the administration. Among those with the most at stake were Dow AgroSciences, a manufacturer of chlorpyrifos, which is used on dozens of fruits and vegetables, and FMC Corporation, a manufacturer of malathion, which is used against mosquitoes as well as chewing and sucking insects that attack a range of crops including tomatoes, strawberries and walnuts.
Dow, which was recently renamed Corteva, donated $1 million to Mr. Trump’s inauguration committee. E.P.A. and Interior Department records show that top pesticide industry executives had regular access to senior agency officials, pressing them to reconsider the way the federal government evaluates the threat pesticides cause to endangered species.
