The Environmental Safety Company (EPA) just lately shuttered the National Environmental Museum, positioned contained in the federal company’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.
In an announcement issued on March 31, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin mentioned the closure would save taxpayers about $600,000 per yr. The small museum was created in 2016, devoted to the nation’s environmental historical past, and included reveals about prevention measures through the Covid-19 pandemic, environmental justice, and efforts to deal with local weather change.
The closure comes lower than a yr after a $4 million enlargement of the Nationwide Environmental Museum and Training Heart opened last May.
“It tells the story of the EPA from its founding below President Richard Nixon via a few of its best success tales bettering human well being and environmental outcomes for the American folks, together with below Republican and Democratic presidents,” a former federal official accustomed to the museum told The New York Post this week.
Zeldin described the EPA museum to the New York Times as a “one-room, little-trafficked museum” principally visited by company employees members. The museum additionally included reveals about environmental points skilled by poor and minority communities, shows which Zeldin described as having a “political agenda” below the Biden administration.
“Gone are the times of funding partisan pet initiatives on the detriment of the American taxpayers and the company’s mission of defending human well being and the setting,” Zeldin instructed the Instances, including that the establishment “conveniently omits any environmental progress” made throughout President Trump’s first time period, throughout which 112 air and water protections were rolled back. Nonetheless, the EPA museum did point out the signing of a regulation eliminating a kind of greenhouse gasoline in 2020, in addition to shows on all of the earlier directors of the federal company, together with Scott Pruitt and Andrew Wheeler, each of whom served throughout President Trump’s first time period in workplace.
In accordance with Zeldin, the museum’s annual prices included $123,000 for cleansing and landscaping, $207,000 for safety guards, $54,000 for magnetometer and X-ray upkeep, about $54,000 for storage, and about $40,000 for upkeep of audiovisual gear.
The closure of the EPA’s small museum follows President Trump’s latest executive order targeting the Smithsonian, a federal consortium of cultural and analysis establishments, to get rid of “divisive” and “anti-American” content material from its exhibitions and restore “monuments, memorials, statues, markers” which were faraway from public areas since 2020.
The “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” order provides Vice President JD Vance the authority to find out what content material is “improper” on the Smithsonian Establishment. A truth sheet from the White Home additionally described the order as being against “anti-American ideology.”
Stan Meiburg, who served as performing deputy EPA administrator from 2014 till 2017, was blunt in his response in regards to the company’s resolution to shut its small museum. “I doubt very a lot that is about value financial savings,” Meiburg instructed the Instances. “It’s about attempting to erase the previous.”
