This is an message released yesterday from an EPA staffer:

"So I work at the EPA and yeah it's as bad as you are hearing: The entire agency is under lockdown, the website, facebook, twitter, you name it is static and can't be updated. All reports, findings, permits and studies are frozen and not to be released. No presentations or meetings with outside groups are to be scheduled.

Any Press contacting us are to be directed to the Press Office which is also silenced and will give no response. All grants and contracts are frozen from the contractors working on Superfund sites to grad school students working on their thesis.

We are still doing our work, writing reports, doing cancer modeling for pesticides hoping that this is temporary and we will be able to serve the public soon.

But many of us are worried about an ideologically-fueled purging and if you use any federal data I advise you gather what you can now.

We have been told the website is being reworked to reflect the new administration's policy.

Feel free to copy and paste, you all pay for the government and you should know what's going on. I am posting this as a fellow citizen and not in any sort of official capacity."

Part of me is upset about this and the way it's being done, but another part of me has seen that these regulatory bodies have been partially if not fully captured by the companies they're meant to regulate. The first Chief Administrator of the EPA was a Monsanto board member. https://muckrakingmaven.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/monsanto_federal_positions.png

Regulatory capture has been a long-time problem with US regulatory agencies, on both sides of the aisle: http://i.imgur.com/emAcFyM.jpg

Regulation is not bad of course, and is often very good and important, but if the governmental regulatory bodies are run by the same companies that the regulation is meant to protect us from, then it often works opposite to its intended goal, or may use the stated regulatory goal to consolidate an existing monopoly.

All that being said, the way Trump's administration is going about it is very ham-fisted and is causing all sorts of problems. Doing things in such a sudden and shocking manner is very disruptive, he did the same thing with the immigration ban of 7 countries. It seems like he is stirring up problems in the name of justice, which is ironically exactly what some of these regulatory agencies and lobbyists are doing. The EPA isn't all bad by any means, but there is a serious problem with revolving door between industry and regulation, something which is banned in most developed countries. Although ultimately I doubt Trump will actually fix this root issue (despite playing off of it to gain support) and will probably only make it worse. I'd love to be happily surprised by being proven wrong though.