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8 hours ago
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Donald Trump’s and Elon Musk’s attacks on federal agencies and funding freezes will be “cataclysmic” for the environment of the sensitive Great Lakes region if not reversed, industry and environmental advocates in the region warn.
Initial actions taken since Trump returned to the White House in January – and put Musk in charge of slashing the federal government – already risk poisoning drinking water, decimating fish populations, and risking the jobs and health of tens of millions of people who rely on the lake system, they add.
Trump and Musk’s cost-cutting agency, the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), promised to dramatically reduce federal spending and workforce levels, and it has already fired hundreds of federal workers while targeting hundreds of millions of dollars of funding dedicated to protecting the waters of the Great Lakes.
The administration and Doge’s sledgehammer approach is particularly dangerous for the ecologically sensitive lake system that spans about 1,200 miles (1,900km) from Minnesota to central New York, said Christy McGillivray, political director for the Sierra Club’s Michigan chapter.
The vital lakes provide drinking water to more than 40 million people in the US and Canada, hold about 90% of the US’s freshwater, and are home to 3,500 species of plants and animals. They also directly support at least $750bn in annual commerce.
“Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s ignorance is staggering, and they have no idea what the federal government does for this region,” McGillivray said.
Among the first Doge casualties was the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s 12-person sea lamprey control unit. Lampreys, called “the vampires of the Great Lakes”, are a deadly invasive species that threatens to devastate the $7bn Great Lakes fishing industry that supports 75,000 jobs because they prey on and suck blood from native fish. The unit was already struggling to keep the lamprey population under control after Covid slowed its work.
Similarly, a multibillion-dollar project in Illinois aimed at repelling invasive silver Asian carp that destroy native fish populations because they deplete food sources has been shelved after federal funding was frozen.
Doge eliminated National Oceanic Atmospheric Agency (Noaa) staff for programs that monitor the lakes’ ice cover and operate water-level gauges and weather buoys – functions “critical to navigation safety”, a spokesperson for the Lake Carriers’ Association, which represents the US-based Great Lakes shipping industry, told Bridge Michigan. “A degradation of the services that we currently get for navigation safety would be detrimental,” he added.
Meanwhile, Trump reportedly wants to shred treaties with Canada that detail how the nations, states and provinces manage the Great Lakes, which could upend the shipping, fishing and tourism industries and damage the environment, advocates say.
Drinking water is also at risk. Musk’s Doge cut Noaa staff that help protect it from toxic algal blooms that are difficult for wastewater treatment plants to address, and can cause vomiting, liver problems and kidney damage. Fertilizer runoff from farmland has driven algae problems in Lake Erie, and as recently as 2014 left 400,000 people around Toledo without water for several days. Federal efforts to rein in the fertilizer runoff will likely be targeted, advocates say.
Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency has proposed cutting 675 out of 1,035 EPA staff members who work in Michigan, said Nic Cantello, a union president representing EPA workers in that state and the upper midwest. Already it has eliminated 18 enforcement staff dedicated to the Great Lakes, including six attorneys, which is grinding to a halt enforcement against the region’s worst polluters.
David Ullrich, a former deputy administrator at the EPA’s region 5 office in Chicago, fears agency employees that manage programs that work with local municipalities to prevent raw sewage from overflowing into the lakes may be next.
Ullrich started working at the EPA in the early 1970s, around when the agency was formed and the Clean Water Act was passed. Around the time, Lake Erie was declared “dead” and some waterways were so polluted that they burned. The government has been “chipping away and chipping away” at the pollution while restoring the lakes, in what Ullrich called a rare decades-long bipartisan effort.
The Great Lakes cuts are a “dramatic problem” in part because the progress can be undone much more quickly than the lakes can be restored, and rebooting the programs after they are scrapped is “tremendously inefficient”, Ullrich said. Taxpayers will spend much more than if the programs continued.
During his first term, Trump sought to scrap the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, which, since its early inception under George W Bush, has coordinated federal agencies’ actions in the region, and funneled $5bn in funding for more than 8,000 projects. Many of those efforts focused on cleaning up pollution hotspots in the lakes and on their shores.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers thwarted Trump’s attempts to cut the program during his first term, but there is less Republican willingness to stand up to the president’s whims so far, Democrats say.
Help isn’t coming at the state level. Federal funding makes up about $750m of the $1bn budget for Michigan’s state environmental agency. The administration is proposing to cut 40% of the $750m, including about $285m for clean drinking water and pollution prevention, Cantello said. Meanwhile, Republicans control the state house of representatives, and just proposed a budget that would fully defund the state’s environmental agency.
The climate crisis is leading to swings in lake levels, increased heavy rainfall events, and flooding along the shores that threatens homes and wildlife, as well as economic activity. The administration is already targeting programs that protect the region from those effects, as well as greenhouse gas-reducing measures.
“The impact is going to be huge, and it’s important to put this in context,” Ullrich said. “The Great Lakes is one of the wonders of the world, it’s our Yellowstone or Grand Canyon here in the midwest, and the impact goes beyond what you can imagine – there’s an incredible economic, social and environmental significance.”
