Questlove has some thoughts on President Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency budget in a new video for Funny or Die, made in partnership with the Natural Resources Defense Council.
“The EPA was created to ensure that our air and water is safe. They clean up hazardous waste in our communities and keep chemicals out of our food,” the musician says in the video. “That’s cool.”
“However, proposed budget cuts would shrink the EPA by nearly a third, crippling the science, data collection and enforcement that protects our health — even gutting a program that tests cancer-causing radon in schools,” he continues. “That’s f—ed up.”
Questlove proceeds in the video to list other things that the EPA does for the environment and our health that would be under threat, like keeping drinking water clean in a reference to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan.
“Reducing these protections? That’s f—ed up,” he says again.
“Without the EPA, we’d have fewer safeguards from harmful levels of smog pollution,” he explains. “That’s f—ed up.”
You get the point.
Under Trump’s proposed 2018 fiscal year budget, the EPA faces cuts of about 30 percent. While environmental groups have been protesting the cuts, the Trump administration says it’s necessary to reduce inefficiencies in the agency. The cuts are part of Trump’s proposed $54 billion reduction in non-defense discretionary spending, which is the same amount the administration proposes adding to security and defense programs.
You can watch Questlove in the video above.