Trout Unlimited criticizes President Trump’s budget proposal

After reviewing President Trump’s Fiscal Year 2018 budget request, Trout Unlimited is criticizing what it calls “ill-conceived cuts” and calling on Congress to reject them.

The president has proposed a 31 percent decrease to the EPA, including elimination of programs to restore the Great Lakes and clean up the Chesapeake Bay basin, as well as enforcement of the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts.

Trout Unlimited also expressed concern over proposals it said would “slash resources needed to manage public and private lands and hunting and fishing access,” as well as “curtail essential science work needed to facilitate watershed resilience in the face of a changing climate.”

“The unwarranted cuts in the budget proposal would take the EPA and other programs back to the last century,” said Steve Moyer, vice president of government affairs for Trout Unlimited. “For members of Trout Unlimited and people like me who have directly benefitted from the water quality and natural resources improvements of the past decades, this is completely unacceptable. We will work hard to convince the Trump Administration and Congress to remember the words of Teddy Roosevelt, reconsider many of these items, and do much better before the  FY 2018 budget is finally decided in the fall.”

Added Moyer, “Projects and programs like the Chesapeake Bay Program, LWCF and the Great Lake Restoration Initiative, all cornerstones of TU’s on-the-ground-work, start with the idea that we can make things better than they are today and they succeed only through hard work and cooperation. But there is much more work to be done, and we want can’t afford to jettison decades of progress.”