Ideological Decisions Trump Data-Based Policy in Flint

Dana Milbank, from the Washington Post, recently argued that the water poisoning residents in Flint flows from an ideological (rather than practical) approach to politics. 

Flint leadership and the Governor of Michigan made their decision on the basis of a principled commitment to less government and lower taxes combined with a deep suspicion of ‘elitist’ arguments from scientists and bureaucrats in the EPA.  Their freedom to be the decision maker on this question (rather than the Federal EPA) was granted by a Congress that shares this principled commitment and suspicion of science.

Imagine you are an ordinary resident in Flint and, along with your neighbors, you start noticing your children getting sick.  Conversations in the church basement spark meetings with your City Council representative, who tells you her hands are tied. 

Your kids keep getting sicker.

A local activist from Friends of the Crooked River writes a letter to the editor revealing that recent tests of the water in your town, coming from a new source for the past two years, has alarmingly high lead levels that studies have shown can cause the types of diseases your children share.

Your City Council representative brings the City Water Commissioner to the next meeting and it gets heated.  But the only outcome is that now you have two competing studies, one showing the water is fine and the other not.  The Mayor appears on TV in a press conference to reassure residents that the water is safe.

Months go by and more kids get more sick.

City Hall and the local Chamber are content with this stalemate, because they are the more powerful player in a conflict framed as residents of one neighborhood vs city hall.  Keeping the scope of this conflict narrow in this way benefits them and makes it easier for them to avoid hard questions and escape accountability for their decision to switch water supplies to save money.

Once the scope of the conflict is expanded beyond local residents and city hall…when the Governor, state and federal EPA, national and international media, presidential campaigns now paying attention…this expansion to bring in new audiences to the dispute brings in new concerns and interests, changes the venue and alters the rules of the game in ways that to impact the outcome of the conflict over water and sick kids.

Of course, residents just want clean water.  That is the presenting conflict.

And for some it likely seems confusing and frustrating that just to get clean water…just to get city officials to do the right thing…they need to figure out how to manage the media and governor and both state and federal EPAs and now presidential candidates and more! 

But a deeper conflict that, on its own, would never have captured the attention of these residents turns out to be an important cause of the presenting conflict that is making their kids sick. 

It is a deeper argument over principle: in this case the role (and reach) of government regulation, with particular attention in this instance on the comparative value of a strong Federal EPA versus a strong State EPA.  Congress chose to write the laws to favor state agency (and constrain the reach of the federal government), and that appears to be a critically important decision that…many steps down the road, resulted in Fling kids getting sick. 

Winning the argument over what this argument is about is the central political dynamic here.  And that argument was won in a smoke-filled committee hearing when free market ideologues in Congress who believe that less government and lower taxes always lead to better outcomes decided to build a wall between the Federal EPA decisions about clean water in Flint.

Milbank’s analysis highlights the importance of this deeper, hidden-in-plain-sight conflict on the children in Flint.  He also highlights the perverse, and Trump-like, response from ideologues when the data is contrary to their deeply held convictions.

‘In a hearing this week about the poisonous water in Flint, Mich., Rep. Earl L. “Buddy” Carter (R-Ga.) tried to blame the lead-tainted water on the Obama administration’s Environmental Protection Agency.

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy explained that, under the law Congress passed, states are in charge of enforcing drinking-water standards.

“The law?” Carter replied, contemptuously. “The law? I don’t think anybody here cares about the law.”

It was an awkward and inadvertent moment of truth. Congress has hamstrung the federal government, giving states the authority to enforce drinking-water standards and all but eliminating the EPA’s power to intervene. This is a pure expression of the conservative doctrine of federalism: States handle things better than the feds because they are closer to the people.’

How could the law matter here? Or science or public health.  The point is that the federal government is too big and intrusive.  Government regulations reduce freedom.  If we can retain our focus on that, rather than the law or science or public health, that would really make me feel like my deeply held convictions and sound-bites needed to get re-elected are safe from critical public scrutiny. 

But if you insist on focusing on the data and sick kids and irresponsible state goverment, I will have to pull a 1984 on you and ‘Squirrel!’ blame the White House and Federal EPA itself.  Yes, this is an irony free (and fact free and humor free) zone.

‘But then came the debacle in Flint, when Michigan authorities embraced cost-saving changes in the city’s water supply and caused mass lead poisoning. Now members of Congress are blaming the EPA for failing to stop the problem — oblivious to the irony that they and their predecessors were the ones who denied the federal government the ability to enforce drinking-water standards in the first place.

It’s a vicious cycle: Washington devolves power to the states. When states screw up, conservatives blame the federal government, worsening the public’s already shaky faith. Having tied the hands of the feds — in this case, the EPA — they use the failure as justification to restrict federal power further, thus giving more control to the states, which caused the problem in the first place.’

This deeper conflict is rarely our focus, because most of us just want government to do the right thing and help us protect our water supply or strengthen our schools or national defense.  This deeper conflict usually feels too abstract for most of us to make sense of it enough to care about it and pay attention to it…but we see here that…

‘This is no abstract problem. The leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination promises to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency — or the “Department of Environmental Protection,” as Donald Trump calls it — “in almost every form” and to “bring that back to the states.”

We don’t have to wonder what that would look like. It would look like Flint.

Under the Safe Drinking Water Act, the EPA takes a back seat to state regulators. Even if the EPA finds evidence that water is unsafe, it can’t take action until it can prove that a problem is widespread — and until it gives a state time to fix the problem.’

This is no abstract problem in at least three very concrete ways: 

1.    very real kids are very sick and that sickness can be traced back to an ideological approach to governance that holds government itself (and citizens who depend on it) in contempt;

2.    the response here from Congress (and the right-wing media) to blame President Obama and the EPA is a very concrete effort to mislead and misinform so we will direct our anger at the wrong targets; and

3.    the front-runner for the Republican nomination wants to vastly expand this approach to governance.

‘In Flint’s case, an official appointed by Gov. Rick Snyder (R) decided in 2013 to save money by changing the water supply, with disastrous results. The EPA had no say. It got wind of the trouble early in 2015, but, by the time it could meet the law’s requirements to take action, Michigan had already switched Flint back to its original water supply.

“Congress was very clear in the law and also in the congressional record that they wanted us to keep in our lane and they didn’t want us to step on states’ rights,” McCarthy testified.

Snyder, whose administration was responsible for the disastrous decisions in Flint, got relatively gentle treatment from Republicans on Thursday while sitting at the witness table with McCarthy. Republican members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee focused their ire on McCarthy.

“I heard calls for resignation. I think you should be at the top of the list,” said Rep. John L. Mica (R-Fla.).

Said the chairman, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah): “Wow, you just don’t get it.”

Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R-Tenn.) said McCarthy should “consider scrapping” other pending regulations because “it’s clear EPA cannot currently handle the issues on its plate.”’

Doubling down on failure to dare the mass media, scholars, activists to find a way to untangle the now decades-long misinformation campaign that makes it easy for Fox News viewers in particular to just nod their heads at this confirmation of what they already believe—yes, the president is a Muslim who follows a radical Christian preacher and is not an American citizens.

‘Even though the EPA should have acted faster once it learned of Flint’s troubles, there is no dispute that the state was solely responsible for the changes that caused the lead poisoning….

Chaffetz, the chairman, joined this complaint. When McCarthy explained that, under the law, she had to provide elaborate documentation before overriding state officials, Chaffetz was livid. “Why do we even need an EPA? If you can’t do that?” he asked. “If you want to do the courageous thing,” he said, you “should resign.”

Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.), comparing McCarthy unfavorably with Snyder, accused her of “fraud, denial, incompetence and bureaucratic nepotism” and said she “should be impeached.”

Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Ala.) accused her of a “coverup.”

Chaffetz called her too slow to implement new rules — an inversion of the usual conservative complaint that the EPA is too quick to impose regulations.

McCarthy responded by noting the “infuriating” aspect of the law — the requirement to give states time to demonstrate that they are fixing problems. “I wish we had yelled from the treetops,” she said. “But there is no way that my agency created this problem.”

No, this problem was created by a rigid adherence to the notion that states will police themselves — and that the federal government should step aside.’

These members of Congress are demonstrating, proudly, a profound lack of leadership.  As my favorite political scientist once put it ‘the unforgivable sin of democratic politics is [for leaders] to dissipate the power of the public by putting it to trivial uses….  Democracy [requires leaders to] define the alternatives of public policy in such a way that the public can participate in the decision-making process.’ 

When, instead, leaders take already challenging issues and work hard to make them even more confusing and confounding, they commit this unforgivable sin and make democracy both less possible and less desirable.

A state panel, appointed by Governor Snyder, found that the state is "fundamentally accountable" for this crisis.  See AP story here.