Trump will provide clean-up grants to communities

The argument

Last month, EPA selected 149 communities to receive nearly $65 million in Brownfields grants. Forty percent of these communities will receive clean-up grants for the first time.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The Brownfields programme is a longstanding, bipartisan EPA scheme that predates and outlasts any single administration, so one round of grant awards does not distinguish the incumbent's environmental record. Weighed against it are the administration's broader rollbacks — of clean-power, methane and vehicle-emissions rules — and withdrawal from the Paris agreement, which bear far more directly on 'better for the environment.' A modest, routine grant cycle cannot carry a conclusion about an overall record that other, larger policy moves pull the other way.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting C] A single cycle of a longstanding bipartisan grant programme does not establish that the administration was better for the environment, especially alongside broad regulatory rollbacks.