The EPA’s head honcho-ette, Lisa P. Jackson recently testified before Congress, making her case for preserving as much of the EPA’s bloated budget as possible. While doing so, she made a veiled threat:

If Congress ever gutted that funding, then EPA would be unable to implement or enforce the laws that protect Americans’ health, livelihoods, and pastimes. Big polluters would flout legal restrictions on dumping contaminants into the air, into rivers, and onto the ground. Toxic plumes already underground would reach drinking water supplies, because ongoing work to contain them would stop. There would be no EPA grant money to fix or replace broken water treatment systems. And the standards that EPA is set to establish for harmful air pollutants from smokestacks and tailpipes would remain missing from a population of sources that is not static but growing.

So if Congress slashed EPA’s funding, concentrations of harmful pollution would increase from current levels in the places Americans live, work, go to school, fish, hike, and hunt. The result would be more asthma attacks, more missed school and work days, more heart attacks, more cancer cases, more premature deaths, and more polluted waters.

Needless to say, then, I fervently request and deeply appreciate continued bipartisan support in Congress for funding the essential work that keeps American children and adults safe from uncontrolled amounts of harmful pollution being dumped into the water they drink and the air they breathe.

President Obama believes that our federal government must spend less money. Decreasing federal spending is no longer just a prudent choice; it is now an unavoidable necessity. Accordingly, the President has proposed to cut EPA’s annual budget nearly thirteen percent from its current level.

Just as local communities always threaten tax paying citizens with cutting police, fire and waste disposal services (the things most important to local communities) when they want more of your tax dollars, Ms. Jackson is threatening to cut water treatment funding unless she keeps her bloated budget.

Real nice.

Predictably, nowhere in her testimony does she say she is going to scale back her enforcement of measures to address the global warming hoax or eliminate her beloved Environmental Justice projects.