The Pentagon, at the last moment, has filed a budget that includes provisions to exempt it from a number of environmental laws and regulations.
They just don’t get it.
Yeah, folks want an effective military, especially these days. But the military’s rep on environmental matters is abominable. And that’s not based on its dilligence on readiness, but just on plain ol’ laziness and lack of oversight. As an employee for a company that is a major DoD contractor for base clean-ups, you can take that as gospel. I could tell you stories …
There are plenty of exemptions already, both systemic and ad hoc. The proposals do not pass the “blindingly convincing” test that further exemptions need.
Heck, if even a conservative like Joel Hefley (my own Representative) is irked by the way the DoD has handled this, you know there’s something wrong with it.
See, that’s the problem with a bad rep. When you cry wolf too often, folks don’t trust you when you claim you’re doing it for real. The DoD has a long way to go before it can convincingly argue that it can be trusted to do the right thing in the environmental arena.
They don’t get it at all.