While Protecting White Supremacists, Trump Was Also Rolling Back Flood Standards For Infrastructure Projects
Photo by Pool/GettyAs Trump’s unceasing parade of nonsensical and offensive comments spews from his mouth like Old Faithful, he’s finding increasingly fewer and fewer allies. No Republicans will defend him. No CEOs will defend him. But amidst all his grandstanding, it could be easy to miss some of the things that he is doing successfully. Namely, he’s rolling back flood standards for infrastructure projects, according to NPR.
Back in the day, Barack Obama signed an executive order that attempted to ensure that new public projects wouldn’t waste taxpayer money by being built in flood-prone areas. The idea is to ensure that new infrastructure be built somewhere where it wouldn’t be destroyed in a couple of years due to flooding or the difficulties of climate change. Naturally, Trump isn’t one for calculated assessments, and he recently signed an executive order rolling all of that back saying, “We’re going to get infrastructure built quickly, inexpensively, relatively speaking, and the permitting process will go very, very quickly.”
The obvious problem here is that new infrastructure is only so helpful if it’s entirely underwater. And given Trump’s unwillingness to address climate change, there are fewer and fewer places that will remain immune to unpredictable weather.