The Government Shutdown Is an Environmental Health Crisis.
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As of today (Friday, January 18), the federal government has been shut down for 28 days, the longest shutdown in modern history. While President Trump’s administration and our Congress struggle to reach an agreement over the President’s request for a southern border wall, 800,000 US government workers are furloughed or forced to work without pay. There are easily discernible implications for those families without incomes who are struggling with their mortgage payments, grocery bills, and ability to meet their basic needs. But there are less obvious shutdown implications that may have long-term impacts on health and well-being, including the loss of important environmental and health protections promised to all people residing in the US.
As the New York Times reported, there are hundreds of EPA pollution inspectors currently off the job. This translates (based on previous years’ numbers) to the loss of about 225 inspections each week. While this may sound like a mundane bureaucratic process, the loss of inspections has real consequence—places that store hazardous waste, manufacture large quantities of chemicals, refine oil, treat drinking water, and emit pollutants to air, water, and soil are all operating without any threat of federal enforcement of environmental law.
At the Food and Drug Administration, the agency responsible for insuring the safety of 80 percent of our nation’s food supply, inspections were also sharply reduced over the past few weeks. While inspectors returned this week (without pay), consumer advocacy groups have voiced concerns over the current safety of our nation’s food supply especially for susceptible individuals like pregnant women and those with life-threatening food allergies.
The loss of crucial inspection services, while deeply troubling, isn’t the only cessation of services that deliver crucial environmental protections. Superfund sites across the country sit still in the absence of federal scientists and workers charged with cleaning them up. The New York Times reported that public hearings related to the cleanup of a Birmingham, Alabama, Superfund site have been cancelled, angering an already hurt and distrustful community. The danger that Superfund sites pose without federal workers will depend largely on the length of the shutdown. It is difficult to predict what might result if an extreme weather event occurs during the shutdown that compromises already precarious Superfund lands. This is not a theoretical question—in 2017, Hurricane Harvey caused significant release of cancer-causing toxins near Houston, and Hurricane Maria contaminated drinking water in Puerto Rico, including with toxic waste from a Superfund site. With dangerous carcinogens, mutagens, and heavy metals contaminating our Superfund sites, how might human health be impacted if Superfund site cleanup is not monitored and maintained?
In addition to the aforementioned environmental health and safety threats, the shutdown poses a threat to the timely, efficient, and valid conduct of science in both the federal and academic arena. The shutdown disrupts the work of federal scientists locked out of laboratories, federal ecologists unable to access the ecosystems they study, as well as engineers, meteorologists, statisticians, and the list goes on. These are people who work on pioneering solutions in cancer, infectious disease, environmental stressors, nuclear threats, energy shortages, and other great risks posed to Americans. They do this work on behalf of the American people who pay taxes with the expectation that their country will be a world leader in scientific innovation for a better and healthier world. This work has now been unjustly and unnecessarily halted for an entire month. While some of this work will be done when the government eventually reopens, other research will be lost permanently, as experiments cannot be paused indefinitely and some studies have considerable ramp-up time.
Furthermore, the shutdown has negative impacts on science and scholarship for the huge number of researchers working in collaboration with federal agencies and/or whose work is funded by these agencies. Members of the Department of Environmental Health here at SPH have reported they cannot access some federal datasets necessary for their work (like data from NOAA, EPA, and data.gov), cannot contact federal collaborating scientists, and cannot work with funding agencies on time sensitive issues related to federal grants.
The importance of collaboration for sound science cannot be overstated. Already, since the shutdown began, federal scientists have lost the opportunity to collaborate at important scientific conferences. Federal scientists from NOAA were absent from the American Meteorological Society Annual Conference. Closer to home, environmental health scientists at SPH are planning to attend the upcoming annual meeting for Centers of Excellence on Environmental Health Disparities Research. Absent a sudden resolution to the shutdown, this meeting will occur without participation from the EPA, and researchers will lose an opportunity for feedback on topics critical to vulnerable populations across the US.
Lastly, perhaps one of the most insidious impacts of the shutdown is that in debating the merits (or lack thereof) of a border wall, we divert our country’s attention and intellectual capital from the things that truly deserve it. While President Trump toys with the idea of declaring a national emergency to allow for resources for his border wall, genuine national emergencies like the climate crisis, the housing crisis, the opioid crisis, the prison crisis, and the gun violence crisis are ignored. These meet the true definition of a national emergency—a problem that is getting worse over time and that truly jeopardizes the health, safety and well-being of the American people.
This diversion is as dangerous as it is pointless, and the magnitude of its threat to public health is proportionate to its length. This seems to be lost on our President, who in a recent conference call told supporters, “We’re going to stay out for a long time, if we have to. We’ll be out for a long time.” It is important that the scientific and academic communities continue to voice our concerns and implore our leaders to put this to an end. Our safety and our science are at risk.
Lindsey Butler, MSc (SPH ’15, SPH ’19) is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Environmental Health and a BU URBAN Fellow. Her work uses environmental epidemiology to examine how climate change impacts the health of vulnerable populations.