On Earth Day this year, the Trump Administration’s EPA Administrator, Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist, appeared in a television interview in which he claimed America’s environment is dramatically cleaner than it used to be.“A lot of younger people, a lot of Millennials voting for the first time, think that the state of the environment is horrible,” Wheeler said. “Actually, our air quality is 73 percent cleaner than it was in the 1970s. Back in the 1970’s, 40 percent of our drinking water systems did not meet the basic EPA regulations or standards. Today, 92 percent of our drinking water systems meet the EPA drinking water standards every single day. So we have clean air, we have clean water. But we can do better and we are doing better.”This is a theme – that the environment is doing well-- often repeated by both the Trump Administration and Congressional Republicans as they propose cutting EPA’s budget by 31 percent and slashing regulations that control air and water pollution.The idea is this: If voters think they don’t really need EPA so much anymore – or more broadly, government in general – that will allow politicians to cut back government and give companies a freer hand to make more profits by dumping more pollution into our waterways and atmosphere.The problem is that Andrew Wheeler’s comments contain narrow elements of truth, but are more generally misleading.