White House Thought Burying a Report About Poison Drinking Water Was a Great Idea
It was an apparent attempt to—wait for it—stave off a “public relations nightmare.”
BY BESS LEVINbMAY 14, 2018 6:47 PM
Imagine, if you will, that you are working for the federal government, and a report from the Department of Health and Human Services comes across your desk revealing that chemicals used by big business and the military, which have seeped into water supplies from New York to Michigan to West Virginia, endanger human health at much lower levels than the E.P.A had previously deemed safe.
You’d probably want to make sure that Americans currently coming in contact with said water were notified about the study immediately, and that cleanup of the contaminated sites began right away—first because it is very obviously the right thing to do, and second because the Flint, Michigan, water crisis, and its associated public health issues, is still fresh in people’s minds.
To most people, the proper course of action would be pretty self-evident! And then you have the Trump administration, whose first impulse is typically to respond in the least responsible, most corrupt, and flat-out dumbest way possible.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/05/white-house-buries-contaminated-drinking-water-study
