This post is part of the EDGI Website Monitoring Team’s “Change of the Week” blog series. This week’s change was made in late August 2020 and features the addition of recommendations regarding whether or not to get tested on the Symptoms and Testing FAQ page of the federal Coronavirus website, created in March 2020 as a collaboration among the White House, CDC, and FEMA (and previously DHHS).
This week’s change is from earlier this summer and features a removal from the Coronavirus.gov “How It Spreads” FAQ webpage. What happened? The question and answer to “Why are we seeing a rise in cases?” was deleted from the coronavirus.gov webpage for frequently asked questions about how the virus spreads.
On March 26, 2020, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a policy memo suspending pollution monitoring requirements for industries that claim to have been impacted by COVID-19. Since then, as part of EDGI’s ongoing Environmental Enforcement Watch (EEW) project, we have conducted original data science research using EPA’s Enforcement and Compliance History Online ECHO database to investigate the effects of this policy on facility reporting of environmental data and compliance with environmental protection laws.
Results show that although few facilities have claimed the COVID exemption, a significant proportion of facilities are still failing to report. This reflects longer-term trends in and issues with both industry non-compliance and EPA non-enforcement. We cannot afford a return to “normal”. Non-compliance with the nations environmental protection laws is already rampant – as high as 70% of facilities under some regulatory programs.
Contributors: Kelsey Breseman, Eric Nost, Gretchen Gehrke, Chris Sellers, Marcy Beck, Lourdes Vera, EDGI On March 26, 2020 EPA released a memo suspending permit enforcement for industries that claim to have been impacted by COVID-19. This memo has already rightly been called out as an unprecedented relinquishment of power (see: The Intercept, The Hill, The … Read more
Computer generated COVID-19 Coronavirus particle By Christopher Sellers, Leif Fredrickson, Alissa Cordner, Kelsey Breseman, Eric Nost, Kelly Wilkins, and EDGI Executive Summary The administration of President Donald Trump has repeatedly undermined science-based policy as well as research that protects public health. That undermining has eroded our government’s capacity to respond to the coronavirus — from … Read more