President Trump, who has cited Ronald Reagan as the kind of Republican he admires, has a funny way of expressing that regard.
In 1984, President Reagan described the Chesapeake Bay as a “treasured national resource” and called for a sizable boost in the EPA budget to begin “the long, necessary effort” to clean up the country’s largest estuary. Every president since—including the ones you liked and the ones you hated—has supported and funded the cleanup. Now comes Donald Trump with his own bold plan. His budget proposes reducing the current $73 million annual federal funding for the EPA’s Chesapeake Bay Program—which steers the state-federal partnership, directing and conducting the cleanup—to zero, starting October 1. That’s right, not one red cent.
The bay—200 miles long, up to 30 miles wide, recipient of river water from six eastern states—is the nation’s largest estuary. It wasn’t just a protein factory, it was the protein factory, producing more seafood per acre than any other body of water on earth. Hauls of oysters in the millions of bushels were common into the 20th century. It is estimated that in pre-colonial times there were enough oysters present to filter all the water in the bay every 3.3 days. By 1980, the same task took 325 days. In the 1970s, the bay was found to contain one…
