Trump Scandal | ModeShift

Traces of Old Farm Chemicals Contaminate Water Across the U.S.

by Keith SchneiderNovember 20, 2025November 20, 20250

Even though it delivers airtight data and analysis essential for understanding and managing the risks industrial societies pose to water, land, and health, the U.S. Geological Survey is a federal science agency that rarely attracts public notice. So when my colleague, Brett Walton, told me about a new USGS study that found diminishing concentrations in groundwater for all but one of a group of twenty-two old-school pesticides widely known to cause disease in humans, I got interested. …

Slashing Federal Budget Is Big Problem for State Environment Agencies

by Keith SchneiderSeptember 25, 2025September 25, 20250

Every dollar that the federal government directs to state environment departments enables the Great Lakes and every other region to steward natural resources, yielding many times the value of the federal contribution. State environment departments make the case daily that they merit more financial support, not less. That is why Circle of Blue’s opinion desk has been worried for months about the dangerous consequences of President Trump’s proposal to rip $5 billion – 55 percent …

“America First” Puts Big Hurt on International Water Programs

by Keith SchneiderSeptember 25, 2025September 25, 20250

Last February, when Elon Musk called the U.S. Agency for International Development “a criminal organization” that had outlived its usefulness, the full calamitous measure of closing the world’s most important human aid organization was not yet apparent overseas or in America. Seven months later it is brutally apparent. Across the planet a shameful retreat is occurring in the global work to secure clean water and safe sanitation for millions of people in Africa and Asia. …

A Muffled American Environmentalism

by Keith SchneiderAugust 22, 2025August 22, 20250

Let’s all stand up and cheer our fellow Americans in the West for raising their voices and shutting down a Republican plan last month to sell millions of acres of the public domain. Even considering Earth Day demonstrations in April, it’s the first time any of the Trump administration’s irrational and dangerous initiatives to impede, weaken, and obliterate the nation’s protections for land, water, and air generated more than a peep of resistance. Where has …

In Promoting Polluting Coal, Trump Looks Back. Way Back.

by Keith SchneiderJuly 11, 2025July 11, 20251

Not so terribly long ago the International Energy Agency issued one of the early century’s most optimistic projections for the environment, human health, and water quality. It declared 2013 the year the world’s operating coal mines had reached peak production of 8 billion metric tons. From that year forward, the agency predicted, the use of the dirtiest fuel to generate electricity would steadily decline, carrying with it planet-healing reductions in climate-changing air emissions and water-polluting …

Trump Wants to Wreck Progress on Restoring Great Lakes

by Keith SchneiderJune 30, 2025June 30, 20250

Atop one of the world’s tallest freshwater sand dunes in northern Michigan’s Benzie County there’s a place to marvel–dawn or dusk–at the magnificence of the Lake Michigan shoreline. The view encompasses Betsie Bay, where the state-protected natural river of the same name empties into the sparkling clean shallows between Frankfort and Elberta. A wide sand beach stretches for miles north and south, a dun-colored threshold defining the space between the big lake’s crystal-clear blue waters …

Trump’s Earth Day Purge

by Keith SchneiderApril 22, 20250

I was a very young cat, just turned 14 years old, when 20 million Americans celebrated the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. Schools closed where I was raised in White Plains, N.Y. to give students like me freedom to take part in all manner of eco-sustaining activities. I gathered a few friends to join me downtown to paint the White Plains train station and drag tires and old appliances from the dark, heavily …

“Hands Off!” Rally In Benzonia, A Fresh Look At The World

by Keith SchneiderApril 6, 2025April 6, 20250

BENZONIA — America, the resistance is us! All of us. We experienced that here in the far northwestern corner of Michigan when more than 500 people gathered with signs displaying all manner of messages of resistance. Then we marched along US 31 to a sound track of excited voices and honking horns in a historic “Hands Off!” protest of President Trump’s MAGA recklessness. Nobody in that crowd ever experienced a political demonstration of that size …

Is Water the Unmentioned Reason for Trump’s Interest in Greenland?

by Keith SchneiderApril 2, 2025April 2, 20250

Say this much, President Trump’s vow to “go as far as we have to” to control Greenland is pernicious, consistent, and ironic. Though he’s obscured his reasons for bringing the world’s largest island under American management, Trump’s aides and geopolitical experts offer three justifications. The first: gaining access to critical minerals, even those for batteries to power the electric vehicles that Trump purportedly dislikes. The second: securing a larger military perch at the top of …

‘Most Momentous Day’ in EPA History? Spare Me.

by Keith SchneiderMarch 24, 2025March 24, 20250

One of the signature moments in contemporary American environmentalism occurred on October 6, 1967, in Suffolk County, New York, when nine scientists and a lawyer formally launched the Environmental Defense Fund. Now a $314-million-a-year global organization with 750 employees, EDF went on to influence pivotal environmental achievements, among them the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, and then helping the agency ban DDT and close the ozone hole. In January, Suffolk County bobbed …