President Donald Trump promises clean water. His proposed budget guts needed protections.

Chicago Tribune

18 hours ago

President Donald Trump promises clean water for every American, but his latest budget eviscerates federal funding to replace toxic lead pipes, filter out forever chemicals and keep sewage out of lakes and streams.
Clean water grants to states would be cut to $303.5 million, down from $2.76 billion set aside in President Joe Biden's last budget. Illinois' share would dip to $11 million, compared with $105.5 million this year.
States loan the money to cities and towns at low interest rates, enabling communities to spread out the cost of critical government services people take for granted, such as replacing leaky street mains, maintaining treatment plants and rehabbing water towers.
Principal payments often are waived for low-income municipalities.
Under Biden the government expanded decades-old programs to speed up the removal of lead pipes in older cities like Chicago and begin to protect Americans from forever chemicals — cancer-causing compounds also known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAS.
Trump and his far-right acolytes are pushing to shortchange those efforts in part to award tax breaks that largely would benefit the ultra-wealthy. The Republican-controlled Congress appears to be along for the ride.
'These programs are key reasons why we have cleaner water across the country,' said Mary Gade, who served as Midwest administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under Republican President George W. Bush. 'What they are doing is creating a chaotic situation where we won't be able to provide basic protections.'
Among other things, the loan programs this year will replace 16 miles of water mains in Chicago, build a station to receive Lake Michigan water in west suburban Yorkville and finance new pumps in northwest suburban Lake Zurich.
Scores of other projects were delayed even before Trump moved to all but eliminate the grant programs. In 2023, the EPA estimated $650 billion is needed nationwide during the next 20 years to catch up.
To put that into further perspective, as of June 24 the Chicago Department of Water Management had only replaced 8,915 of more than 400,000 lead service lines across the city.
Asked how significantly pared-down grant programs square with Trump's promises of a clean, healthy environment, the EPA issued a statement:
'These resources reflect the administration's commitment to environmental stewardship, cooperative federalism, and delivering results that make a real difference in Americans' lives. EPA is focused on returning the agency to administering core statutory obligations as Congress intended.'
Congress created what are known as state revolving funds to carry out the goals of the Clean Water Act, one of the bedrock environmental laws approved by bipartisan majorities during the early 1970s.
Illinois received more than $72 million this year for wastewater projects and $33 million to protect drinking water.
In May, the Illinois EPA approved $10 million in loans for Chicago to replace lead service lines next year as part of a $138 million outlay for similar projects statewide. Replacements worth another $239 million were delayed because funding wasn't available, according to state records.
If Illinois only gets $11 million in revolving fund grants next year, as Trump is proposing, the waiting list will get longer.
Other projects that could be on the chopping block include a new well and treatment plant in Cary and new filtration equipment in Fox Lake to remove PFAS from drinking water.
Trump's proposed cuts follow the agenda of Project 2025, an anti-government blueprint written in part by Russell Vought, now chief of the White House budget office.
The spending plan Vought's office drafted for Trump would further reduce federal support for clean water, air and energy programs gutted last week by congressional Republicans.
'We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so,' Vought told supporters of his pro-Trump think tank in 2023, according to a video first reported by ProPublica, a nonprofit journalism organization. 'We want to put them in trauma.'
People outside Trump's MAGA orbit have sharply criticized the dramatic changes.
'If approved (by Congress), we believe these cuts … will have unintended yet foreseeable negative impacts for business, jobs growth and economic development,' a bipartisan group of former environmental officials from 31 states wrote in a June 23 statement.
'This is a reckless and short-sighted proposal that will lead to higher levels of toxic pollution in the air we breathe and water we drink across the nation,' said Michelle Roos, executive director of the nonprofit Environmental Protection Network, a group of former U.S. EPA officials. 'This is a wrecking ball approach that would gut America's frontline defense for protecting people's health and environment.'
Nicole Cantello, president of the union for EPA employees based in Chicago, said morale at the agency is far worse than it was during Trump's first term.
'The Trump people talk out of both sides of their mouths,' Cantello said. 'They repeatedly attack people who believe in the agency's mission. It breaks your heart.'
More than 270 EPA employees from across the country signed a letter last week condemning what they called the Trump administration's moves to benefit polluters, reverse progress to address pollution in low-income communities of color and dismantle the agency's science office.
On Thursday, 144 of the agency officials who signed the letter received emails saying they had been placed on leave for two weeks 'pending an administrative investigation.'