Letter to the editor: Where is our congressman?

September 12, 2025

That Trump is threatening our environment and health in the Rogue Valley should be obvious to all. Trump demonstrated during his first term that he rejects data, evidence, and science.  During the COVID crisis, he tried suppressing testing.  This was how we knew whether the pandemic was rising, holding, or falling. Better to remain ignorant, increase our risk, and stop testing, he argued.

Despite the increasing drought and wildfire risk and increasing hurricane severity we are experiencing, all driven by climate change, Trump’s Department of Energy has produced a bogus report arguing that climate change isn’t a problem. His Environmental Protection Agency now seeks a repeal of its 2009 Endangerment Finding regarding greenhouse gases so all policies and rules limiting gas emissions can be revoked.  If successful, this will throw the world into an accelerated global warming and a climate crisis that threatens all life on the planet, probably by the end of the century.

In addition, Trump deleted from the federal website the National Climate Assessment Reports developed in response to a congressional decree by the U.S. Global Change Research Program.  Presumably, he thinks that if we don’t know the threats the climate poses, they will disappear.

And now his totally unqualified and incompetent Secretary of Health and Human Services has decided that life-saving vaccines are worthless and he’s curtailing our access to them.

These actions all threaten us! Where is our congressman?

Trisha Vigil, Medford

Picture of Steve Mitchell

Steve Mitchell

Siskiyou Woodcraft Guild Harvest Show of fine woodworking OSF Hay-Patton Rehearsal Center across from Ashland Springs Hotel Ashland Oregon

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