Sunday, June 21 — the pollution proxy

0:00 Two facts tell you everything about today. The EPA filed just four Clean Water Act consent decrees last year. And about half its enforcement staff have left the building.

0:12 Start where the work happens: pollution enforcement. The EPA has collapsed to a historic low — four consent decrees in all of 2025, compared to 26 in the first year of Trump's previous term.

0:27 Half the enforcement staff is gone. And it's not just water: the Justice Department landed a single Clean Air Act consent decree in the same period.

0:38 So when beaches close because of sewage overflows — and they are closing, more and more — the immediate cause is bacteria, but the deeper cause is a federal enforcement machine that's been deliberately starved.

0:52 Environmental injustice by design, the report calls it. Hard to argue. Then there's the highway tunnel project that wants to cut through ancient redwoods. Del Norte County, California.

1:07 The only road linking Crescent City to Humboldt County keeps sliding, so Caltrans picked a 6,000-foot tunnel as the fix — $2.7 billion dollars.

1:18 But the tunnel would destroy old-growth redwoods that have stood for centuries. The environmental impact report acknowledges the damage, then proposes offset credits and off-site restoration.

1:31 Save the Redwoods League calls that inadequate. They're right. You can't buy back a thousand-year-old grove with a credit. Across the country, the U.S. keeps stepping back from the world stage.

1:45 On January 7th, a presidential memo directed withdrawal from 66 international organizations — including the Venice Commission, multiple UN bodies. This isn't random isolationism.

1:59 It's the Project 2025 foreign policy playbook: centralize power, dismantle USAID, replace multilateral cooperation with bilateral, transactional deals.

2:12 The Carnegie Endowment calls it a hollowing out of the post-WWII order. The Global Soft Power Index shows the steepest decline ever for the U.S.

2:24 Meantime, California Governor Gavin Newsom alleges that the DOJ investigation into him and his wife was directly ordered by the president.

2:34 Multiple sources dispute that — they trace it to whistleblower complaints through the Sacramento U.S. Attorney's office.

2:42 But Newsom's former chief of staff, Dana Williamson, did plead guilty in May to unrelated fraud charges.

2:50 The episode underscores how politicized federal law enforcement has become, whether or not the direct order claim holds up. And there's a merger you should know about. Fox is buying Roku for $22 billion.

3:05 The Murdoch family would control both the content — Fox News, Fox Sports, Tubi — and the operating system that sits in more than half of U.S. broadband homes. Shareholder and regulatory approval still needed.

3:21 But if it goes through, one partisan family will algorithmically steer millions of viewers toward right-wing programming. That's not a media system that serves democracy.

3:33 Closer to home: Islip, New York, renewed its contract letting ICE train at the town's public rifle range. Another five years. Councilman Guadrón was the lone dissenting vote. The financial details remain undisclosed.

3:51 Under the Project 2025 vision of devolving enforcement to local jurisdictions, deals like this become force multipliers for ICE.

4:01 And France's heat-wave response shows what national climate action looks like: red alerts in 35 departments, canceled outdoor sports, emergency services deployed. The U.S.

4:14 still has no final federal heat standard for outdoor workers. OSHA has a proposed rule and an updated emphasis program, but no binding protection yet. Finally, two stories about money and public trust.

4:30 The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool turned green. The administration blamed vandals and made arrests.

4:38 But the real problem is two no-bid contracts: one for $14.7 million to repaint the pool with a waterproof sealant that peeled, and another for $1.7 million to a Trump donor named John Cafaro, who previously pleaded guilty to conspiracy to bribe a congressman.

4:58 Instead of answering for that, the administration uses federal law enforcement to arrest a cyclist. It's a small parable for a larger pattern. Project 2025 is a 900-page document, and we read it line by line.

5:15 So far we've tracked 829 distinct actions that map back to it. 147 of those have been reframed and logged. This isn't a single day's work — it's a constant watch.

5:27 Louisiana's Medicaid work requirement kicks in January 1, 2027 — the state estimates 47,000 people will lose coverage. The Fox-Roku merger faces regulatory review, not expected to close before mid-2027.

5:45 Next month, the National Park Service is due to release its oversight report on sole-source contracts at the Reflecting Pool. That's Sunday, June 21. We read the documents so you don't have to. We'll be back tomorrow.