Article snippet: The budget released by the White House today follows through on Environmental Protection Agency. The new budget plan cuts 31 percent of the agency’s funding overall, including significant reductions to research programs and enforcement of clean air and clean water programs. Environmental research faces one of the largest cuts; Trump’s budget proposes cutting almost half of the research budget, or $234 million. OMB Director climate change. He questioned whether that was a good use of taxpayer money. "Do we target it? Sure. Do a lot of the EPA reductions aim at reducing the focus on climate science? Yes. Does it mean that we are anti-science? Absolutely not," Mulvaney said during a briefing on Tuesday. "We're simply trying to get things back in order to where we can look at the folks who pay taxes and say, 'Look, we want to do some climate science, but we're not going to do the crazy stuff the previous administration did." The proposal cuts more than $129 million -- or 23 percent -- from enforcement across all EPA programs, including programs that support clean air and clean water, which the Trump administration has said it will protect. The budget says some of the enforcement will be delegated to the states. But advocates say a cut of this magnitude could cripple the EPA and the states won’t be able to pick up the slack. "It’s pretty much not a surgical strike, it’s more like a machete chop to most of the major body parts at EPA and most of the o... Link to the full article to read more