Understanding Government

sea lamprey

Now that there is no federal government shutdown we can start to analyze all the cuts made in order to achieve a $38 billion reduction in federal spending for the rest of the year. One cut, reports the Associated Press’s John Flesher, is a reduction in money to the Great Lakes Fishery Commission (which is run out of the National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration and is not to be confused with the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative). About 90 percent of the commission’s $22 million annual budget goes to working with Canada to stop the spread of invasive sea lamprey in the Great Lakes. The eel-like lamprey are “parasitic invaders” and budget cuts surely means that more of the species will proliferate in the Great Lakes. Michigan Democratic Senator Carl Levin has promised to fight against Fishery Commission cuts in the FY12 budget.

America’s western states are fast running out of water and the trend is being exacerbated by global warming, according to two new scientific studies, reports Felicity Barringer of The New York Times.

Researchers at the Stockholm Environment Institute determined that water usage in five arid western states — Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah — will exceed sustainable levels by 1.8 billion acre feet over the next century; the institute also calculates what it would cost to replace that water. Add in the presumed effects of global warming, and the problem is up to half a billion acre feet worse. (more…)

The tiny, mid pacific islands known as American Samoa has succeeded in an effort that remains elusive in California: banning plastic shopping bags.

The law, signed just days ago, goes into effect in February.

The move taken by the American territory was applauded by the federal EPA, according to Guam’s Pacific Daily News. While plastic bag bans or fees have been enacted in a number of municipalities, American Samoa is the first state government or territorial administration to take such an action. (more…)

The Obama administration has deployed the ‘BP Squad’ of federal investigators to the Gulf to probe whether there was any wrongdoing on the part of government regulators or private companies related to the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig.

As Peter Henning points out in The New York Times, the criminal probe focuses mostly on (more…)

Part of the promise of an Obama presidency is a government that will take on new responsibilities: ensuring every citizen gets health care, facilitating a renewable energy economy. Another part, though, is just undoing the dumbest things George W. Bush did.

Today, as the Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin reports, Barack Obama overturned a Bush administration rule that had significantly weakened the endangered species act. For years, in order for a federal construction project to go forward, both the Interior Dept’s Fish and Wildlife Services and the Commerce Dept’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) had to make sure it complied with the Endangered Species Act. The Interior and Commerce departments changed this rule in December 2008.

Why the Bush administration sought to take away a core government protection of endangered species is anyone’s guess. Maybe it would have made it easier to build a particular military base or the U.S.-Mexico border fence. Maybe Dick Cheney just really had it in for endangered species. Whatever the case, it’s one less thing bloggers of the executive branch have to worry about. -MB