Public Health, William Paterson University, 300 Pompton Road, Wayne, NJ, 07470, USA.
History Department, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, 11794, USA.
J Public Health Policy. 2021 Jun;42(2):281-297. doi: 10.1057/s41271-021-00276-z. Epub 2021 Feb 10.
The Trump administration has severely curtailed the work of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA has rolled back environmental protections, lost ground on addressing climate change and environmental justice, and shed large numbers of experienced staff. All of this has accelerated a longer-term decline in EPA resources, expertise, and authority. Here, we present perspectives of EPA employees and retirees on reconfiguring and strengthening the agency to address current and future environmental health problems, based on qualitative data obtained through 100 semi-structured interviews with 76 current and former EPA employees. Interviewees emphasized a number of internal and external issues, including a hyper-partisan context in which the agency operates, lack of public understanding of the extent of domestic and global environmental problems, budget shortfalls, staffing and leadership challenges, reduced scientific capacity and use of science in decision-making, insufficient attention to environmental justice, and lagging technology. We argue that reforms cannot only be expert-driven but must also come from the public, incorporating community driven solutions and focusing on remedying environmental injustice.
特朗普政府大幅缩减了美国环境保护署（EPA）的工作。EPA 撤销了多项环境保护措施，在应对气候变化和环境正义方面也落后了，还裁减了大量经验丰富的员工。所有这些都加速了 EPA 资源、专业知识和权威的长期下降。在这里，我们根据通过对 76 名现任和前任 EPA 员工进行的 100 次半结构化访谈获得的定性数据，提出了 EPA 员工和退休人员关于重组和加强该机构以解决当前和未来环境健康问题的观点。受访者强调了一些内部和外部问题，包括该机构运作的超党派环境、公众对国内和全球环境问题程度的理解不足、预算短缺、人员配备和领导力挑战、科学能力下降以及在决策中对科学的利用不足、对环境正义的关注不足以及技术滞后。我们认为，改革不仅可以由专家推动，还必须来自公众，纳入社区驱动的解决方案，并注重纠正环境不公正。
