Candidate Trump made no secret for his disdain for Nixon's signature creation, brought into being by executive order to protect human health and the environment.
If you want to see what the future holds for New Jersey without an Environmental Protection Agency, look to the not-so-distant past.
Look first at a photo of the George Washington Bridge taken in 1973, three years after the Nixon Administration created the federal watchdog agency.
Or rather, look at what you can only believe is the famed bridge, since the image is shrouded in a layer of smog so impenetrable that only the span's upper arches are faintly visible.
Then take a gander at tons of debris rotting in a site in Jersey City, while nearby an ineffectual wooden sign proclaims, almost mockingly, "Private Property, No Dumping."
The photo, also taken in 1973, displays the outline of the Manhattan skyline looming over piles of what could only be years of accumulated waste.
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And then behold the Arthur Kill, the nine-mile tidal straight that separates Staten Island from Union and Middlesex Counties.
That picture, circa 1974, shows a festering dumping ground collecting industrial waste and toxic runoff, the legacy of corporate negligence and government indifference.
The series of images comes to us courtesy of the U.S. National Archives with a message that begs to be heard: Under the president's budget, which would slash nearly a third of the funding for the EPA, this nightmarish landscape might again be our reality.
Candidate Donald Trump made no secret for his disdain for Nixon's signature creation, brought into being by executive order to protect human health and the environment.
Days after he was inaugurated, President Trump issued a gag order barring the agency from communicating with the media, imposed a hiring freeze and stripped the EPA of the power to hand out grants.
He appointed to administer the agency Scott Pruitt, a man who had sued it multiple times, a man who has said repeatedly that he wants to chip away at its reach and authority.
And now he has proposed lowering the EPA's budget from $8.1 billion to $5.7 billion, and eliminating more than 3,000 jobs from a staff of 15,000.
On Tuesday, he is expected to sign an executive order that will put American jobs ahead of dealing with climate change, overturning a number of Obama-era regulations.
New Jersey, be very afraid.
Water-quality and climate change research? Auto-fuel efficiency standards and smokestack guidelines? Federal response to environmental emergencies? All these would be consigned to history's dust bin under the new regime.
And the Garden State, with its traffic-choked highways and its toxic waste sites, among the most polluted in the nation, will be among the hardest hit.
Trumps EPA budget flirts with danger. Leaving the clean-up of the environment in the hands of the very corporations that despoiled it is an exercise in futility, as the archived pictures so heartbreakingly illustrate.
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