EPA Headquarters: Epicenter of the Draining Swamp
Karma visits for Christmas, gifting the agency with sewage overflows and staff reductions!
Perhaps no agency has been so public about its #Resistance to President Donald Trump and his efforts to drain the swamp and reduce regulations than the Environmental Protection Agency.
Perhaps, then, it is fitting that as we approach the 1-year anniversary of the Trump inauguration, the agency’s headquarters appears to be the epicenter of a draining swamp.
Between the threat of budget cuts, major restructuring, and having a climate change skeptic run the show, it’s been a pretty rough year to work at the Environmental Protection Agency. On Thursday, things only got shittier.
Employees at the EPA headquarters in Washington, DC, discovered that sewage was literally spewing out of the water fountains, E&E News reports. They got an email at about 9 AM letting them know that there was a “water line back up” causing an “issue” with the fountains. According to the folks inside, “issue” was an understatement.
“A sewer problem at EPA HQ has resulted in poop exploding out of water fountains,” Dan Becker, director of the Safe Climate Campaign, told E&E.
The poopsplosion pictured apparently detonated outside the EPA’s Office of Policy, in a hallway nearby EPA administrator Scott Pruitt’s office, Mashable reports. According to E&E News, a few other water fountains overflowed on the same floor, and the odor from the black sludge wafted into nearby offices.
Given the EPA’s role in the Animas River disaster, it appear that Karma may have paid a Christmas visit:
In perhaps the most ironic metaphor of 2017, a backed-up water fountain at the #EPA headquarters in DC reportedly spewed sewage everywhere this week. Maybe we should start referring to the political landscape as a sewage fountain instead of a dumpster fire ???????? #EPASewageOverflow pic.twitter.com/xjsIOHJ7Sm
— Texas Sierra Club (@TexasSierraClub) December 15, 2017
The drainage of employees is continuing as well, with over 700 bureaucrats resigning in the past year.
“According to agency documents and federal employment statistics, 770 EPA employees departed the agency between April and December, leaving employment levels close to Reagan-era levels of staffing,” ThinkProgress said. “According to the EPA’s contingency shutdown plan for December, the agency currently has 14,449 employees on board—a marked change from the April contingency plan, which showed a staff of 15,219.”
After months of crying at their desks over Trump’s election victory, bureaucrats are now “quitting in disgust.”
“There has been a drop of employees of 770 between April and December. While several hundred of those are buyouts, the rest of those are either people that are retiring or quitting in disgust,” Kyla Bennett, who works for a nonprofit for government environment works, told ThinkProgress. “Is that number higher than it would normally be? I think it is.”
Guess where are some of the climate change activist are headed! France!
Eighteen climate scientists, 13 of them based in the United States, were on Monday named the first beneficiaries of the research grants linked to French President Macron’s “Make Our Planet Great Again” project, which will see them relocate to France.
“The selected projects are of very high standards and deal with issues that are particularly important,” the jury said in a statement, noting its members had received a total of 1,822 applications, of which 1,123 came from the US. A second round of laureates will be announced “during the course of the spring of 2018”, it said.
Frankly, this kind of outsourcing I can get behind. It’s good that there are more spots open in France, too. The Trump goal is reducing the agency’s numbers by 20%!
The EPA, like the FBI, was once a respected and trusted institution. The self-righteous, eco-activists that have infested the agency have hurt the nation by altering its primary mission of real pollution prevention (e.g., focusing on lead and not life-essential carbon dioxide).
The government’s climate change warriors were allowed to to so because no politician dared to pull the plug and be deemed a “evil polluter”…until President Trump. Now, most normal Americans probably feel like this:
“What do you call 700 employees leaving the EPA?”
“A good start!”
*rimshot* https://t.co/Wole8PDGRy
— David Edward (@_David_Edward) December 15, 2017
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Comments
They’re going to need a big toilet plunger! Hugely!
Do you see how easy it is for these people to move to France and integrate into the global leftist paradigm? This is only slightly harder than it will be for them to move back to the EPA once Trump is gone, if no permanent legislation dismantles the infrastructure.
Trump’s actions, no matter how laudable, are as temporary as Obama’s were without laws to back them up. Congress needs to get off its ass and do something.
If I correctly remember an article about Pruitt, the action plan is to tie every EPA function back to a law. No authorization, the program is then walked back using whatever means is required. I think if a rule went through the comment & publication process, it has to be reversed in the same way. Likewise, if they find a program that is authorized but makes no sense, then they intend to go back to Congress to get the law deleted.
A lot of the activity in the first few months of the year were related to Congress reversing the regulations put in place in the last six months of the Obama Administration using the Congressional Review Act. This link lists what has happened under the CRA: https://www.gao.gov/legal/congressional-review-act/faq
So, I think the game plan is to properly dismantle the waste areas so the next D can’t easily reinstate the rules. It’s a slow process, but I think they will get to the desired size & function. I would not be surprised if we see a lot of duplicate programs shifted to one agency and then quickly eliminated as waste.
In August, there was an Exec Order concerning “establishing discipline and accountability in the environmental review and permitting process for infrastructure projects.” They want to get the entire process down to two years instead of forever. It’s important since Obama admitted that there are really no “shovel ready” projects. I think the report should be out by February 2018 (six months).
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/presidential-executive-order-establishing-discipline-accountability-environmental-review-permitting-process-infrastructure/
If you read about Trump’s schedule, he has a lot of full cabinet meetings as well as working lunches with Pence and a specific cabinet member or two. Trump had a lot of industry discussion/listening meetings where the participants all came out and talked about how impressed they were with Trump.
The DC crowd also has complained that Trump hasn’t filled his administration with the 4,000+ political appointments, but I suspect that he told his cabinet to first evaluate if that position is necessary. Look to how staff positions Melanie got rid of compared to Michelle’s Office of the First Lady.
That’s right.
Sh!t just got real.
😉
The EPA has been quietly populating itself with rabid environmental activists since its inception. And, given the power, which Congress has quietly bestowed upon the agency to appease the loony environmental left, a huge problem now exists. The biggest problem is that the agency can not be dismantled or eliminated without the consent of Congress.
““According to the EPA’s contingency shutdown plan for December, the agency currently has 14,449 employees”
770 down, 14,448 to go!
The building is a bio-hazard now. Employees should not have to work in such conditions. Shut it down.
Also love how the link says that Hundreds of EPA Employees Have Quit Under Trump. After months of crying at their desks, bureaucrats now ‘quitting in disgust’
but the small print says 700 of those quitting were buyouts.
The doctrinaire pigs are indeed the epicenter of militarized agency fascism. Made up of irrational micro-agenda haters, they have destroyed hundreds of thousands of jobs. In addition to the announced steps, these employees should be made to relinquish their guns, military personnel vehicles, and ammunition. Under Obama the EPA commenced a bizarre program of arming the agency against American citizens. These people do not get the fact they are not judges, police officers or a military wing.
How does sewage backup into the water system? They are supposed to be entirely separate. That is impossible in any properly designed system.
Must be an EPA designed system…
Don’t forget that you have to properly maintain and inspect such systems on an annual basis.
From the picture, it looks like the good water pipes were not affected but the water fountain drain pipe is what backed up – a massive failure of the backflow prevention device.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backflow_prevention_device
Good point.
I read the “water line backup” as indicating the water itself became contaminated, not a backup through the drain.
The article was written by someone who never dealt with plumbing, water and sewer lines.
Rethinking my comment on the maintenance of plumbing, I don’t think I’d trust the water since there could be some cross contamination of the systems. Think of poor welds of joints with some sewage leakage onto a potable water pipe which also has poor welds. I’d be bringing my own water and coffee into work.
Did you notice that someone was able to take a picture of the fountain, but failed to block off the area – where is the caution tape? Can you imagine coming fast around the corner and slipping in the stuff?
Water lines are under pressure, any bad joints, welds or otherwise, should be leaking water. As long as the pressure is maintained there should be no possibility of contamination.
Someone needs to call OSHA and report the EPA violation… Any spill requires the area to be cordoned off as soon as possible. In the industrial plants I go into, the finder of any spill is required to make sure it is contained as much as possible and roped off.
Has to be the same bunch who ran the Animas River project.
Great. Now all those sh*t for brains bureaucrats are going to blame their deficiencies on the drinking fountain.
And why beholdest thou the spotted owl that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the shit fountain that is in thine own offices?
Paging Mike Rowe…. here is a GREAT reprise for your “Dirtiest Job” series… the epic “Draining the Swamp”. Reptiles (Senate Turtle), poisonous snakes, leeches, parasites, rotting corpses… just the usual day to day stuff in D.C.
I’d like to burn some ceremonial tires, on a hibachi, in front of the EPA HQ and invite all the neighbors to bring their own twigs and green weenies. Free marshmallows to anyone appearing in a Michelle mask or wearing a boob-belt.
Someone must have cross connected the two separate water and sewage systems.The drinking water system is pressurized and the sewage system is normally gravity flow by design. they also normally use much different pipe materials and diameters. It was very likely it was deliberate though with government plumbers anything is possible.
If so it was undeserved. The EPA arose out of #fakenews like Love Canal and the supposed hazards of DDT.
How many people do you suppose the Fake News about DDT killed?
Millions. But they’re people of a different color so the Left doesn’t care.
Somewhere around 1975 or ’76 before I went to law school I was running the drug lab for a dope clinic. It was an ancient building in downtown Chicago with inadequate infrastructure. It had DC current for instance, There was one main drain pipe and it was located in my lab. The clinic decided to open a gynecology exam room about 40 feet down the hall and hired a plumber to build drain lines. He used 1 inch copper pipe. Way too small and he didn’t have the 1/4 in per foot drain pitch required by code. Anyway a few weeks later the doctors came running back to my complaining about a clogged drain. I told them it wasn’t my problem, but they made it my problem. We didn’t have an auger. I tried a toilet plunger several times. No dice. All I had left was the lab’s air compressor. I put a heavy metal plate in the gyne sink to deflect blowback and went back to improvising how to block off my sinks so I could apply the 125 lbs of air pressure directly to the drain line. Fifteen minutes later I was ready to rip. I was up on the counter with my feet in a sink holding down a thick rubber sheet with a hole I drilled in it for the tip of a blow gun. My two assistants were doing likewise with two other gaskets on the far sinks. Rube Goldberg for sure. I let that air go into the pipes again, again and again. All of a sudden there’s screaming, banging and yelling at my door. I stop blowing, jump off the counter and open the door. Here’s one of the doctors covered in black sludge on his whole upper body. A very unhappy camper. I went back to the exam room and all of them looked blackened along with the ceiling and upper walls. Apparently one of them had removed my heavy metal plate from the drain. I don’t know exactly what was in that black stuff, but it was from junkie genitals you wouldn’t touch with out full body armor, Gynecological detritus I suppose. It surely wasn’t anything food grade.
If we can make an educated guess that the average salary and benefits of each employee is about $125,000/yr, then the US taxpayer will save just under $100,000,000 a year with their departure – and that’s just for these piddling 770. And with no detrimental effect on the environment whatsoever. I call that winning.
Now, my own Department (State) is experiencing something similar. That’s more savings, with no detrimental effect whatsoever on diplomacy (that’s actual diplomacy, not SJW ranting and bullying). And what makes this even more beautiful is that the most leftist among the departments are the ones self-selecting themselves out of gov’t. Sounds like Romney was on to something in 2012 with his self-deporting concept.
Imagine the benefits to America when an entire department (say, like the Dept of Education) is done away with.
14,449 employees at the EPA? That’s about 14,200 too many. And at IndependentDem’s $125,000/yr assessment, that’s $1.775B … that’s winning. Do that to each of the overbloated cabinets …
770 out of 14,449? 5.3%? Sounds like a piss-poor start to me! (Or should I say “shit-poor”?)
Take the number of people hired by the EPA in the past 15-20 years and subtract 700. That will leave the approximate number of employees who should be fired from the EPA.