The Trump administration has undertaken an assault on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), an agency critical to environmental health. This assault has precedents in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. The early Reagan administration (1981-1983) launched an overt attack on the EPA, combining deregulation with budget and staff cuts, whereas the George W. Bush administration (2001-2008) adopted a subtler approach, undermining science-based policy. The current administration combines both these strategies and operates in a political context more favorable to its designs on the EPA. The Republican Party has shifted right and now controls the executive branch and both chambers of Congress. Wealthy donors, think tanks, and fossil fuel and chemical industries have become more influential in pushing deregulation. Among the public, political polarization has increased, the environment has become a partisan issue, and science and the mainstream media are distrusted. For these reasons, the effects of today's ongoing regulatory delays, rollbacks, and staff cuts may well surpass those of the administrations of Reagan and Bush, whose impacts on environmental health were considerable.

Between 1949 and the 1980s, fisheries managers transplanted the tiny Mysis relicta shrimp into hundreds of lakes and reservoirs in North America and Europe. They hoped to create self-sustaining food for fish. However, most of these experiments failed spectacularly, destroying the fisheries they were intended to bolster. The mysid introductions can be viewed as a 'biological fix', or 'bio-fix', akin to technological fixes. Fixes are solutions to complex social or environmental problems, but the solutions are conceived in an unsystematic and partial way. This makes the solutions appear cheaper and easier than they are and can result in failure and unintended consequences. The mysid introductions illustrate the bio-fix concept. Biological solutions to fisheries problems arose because technological solutions (fertilisation, hatcheries) were impractical or inadequate. Self-reproducing organisms appeared to solve those problems. Changing technology, growing ecological knowledge and the apparently successful introduction of mysids in several lakes made mysid introductions seem cheap, easy and enormously beneficial. But the fervour for mysids masked the many uncertainties and contradictions in knowledge about mysids and their role in ecosystems. Mysids were often not edible by the fish they were intended for. More troublingly, they competed for food with those fish, ultimately causing the collapse of fisheries. Fisheries managers subsequently tried to revive, reassess or reinvigorate large technological solutions, such as dams and fertilisation, to save fisheries, but this was not usually successful.