It’s easy to say that EPA (or OSHA, FDA, NIOSH) is not proactive enough in tracking, investigating, remediating, and preventing harm or pollution. And does not have enough enforcement and forward-reaching abilities.
I agree.
The EPA was not established to be proactive in the ways we might want. Those were later cobbled add-ons. The EPA was created on December 2, 1970, by President Nixon’s executive order.
Nixon faced tanking popularity due to a failing Vietnam War, and following Watergate was threatened with multiple investigations. He correctly saw environmental issues as expedient popular issues and sought to improve ratings.
There was no national response to mitigate impacts from polluted air and killer smog (Pittsburgh, Loss Angelas, NY, NJ, all major cities).
Polluted waters were harming and killing vegetation and people. Destruction of the Everglades. Mines and toxic dumps caught fire.
Chemicals seeped into water supplies, schools, and residences (New York’s Love Canal). There was no way to manage pesticides killing eagles and birds (DDT—Rachel Carlson’s “Silent Spring” in 1962). Etc.
Nixon couldn’t get his EPA bill passed through Congress so he created EPA by executive order.
EPA was an after-thought, after-the-fact administrative means to address these things. States had few or no effective laws or authority (what, regulate industry?).
Landfills, if regulated, mostly dealt with aesthetics. Can they be seen and do they smell? Preventing radionuclides and chemical waste? Nope.
That all came later. EPA was cobbled together from over a dozen federal programs transferred to EPA.
https://www.epa.gov/history/origins-epa
By the end of 1971, it was clear more needed to be done; 5,700 people worked for EPA.
Ever since, powerful forces have targeted the EPA and its programs from every quarter: corporate, industrial, political, and libertarian.
They seek to restrict programs and even “wind down” the EPA under the political rubric of so-called government overreach and a bloated administrative state.
One very effective way to hobble EPA and federal programs is restricting funding.
Dollar for dollar EPA’s budget hasn’t increased with inflation for decades.
EPA’s budget in 1995 was $7,240,887,000 with 17,508 staff.
EPA’s budget in 2023 was $10,135,433,000 with 15,115 staff.
The dollar has lost 51% of its value since 1995.
EPA’s 2010 budget = $10,297864,000 with 17,278 staff
That says it all.
Budgets consider both parties, even allegedly EPA-favorable parties and presidents. Politicians pay lip service.
After the 2008 market crash, as part of the “Sequester” Law, which Obama signed stating he “really didn’t want to,” my EPA salary was cut 6% (yet banks, Wall Street firms, and brokers received public monies that covered bonuses… ). We got zero increases for three years.
Government workers are easy political targets, despite the fact that I spent thousands of unpaid hours preparing for ongoing lawsuits plus my regular duties, weekends, evenings, and holidays, despite civil service regulations.
Work needed to get done, and we were always understaffed—you do what you gotta do.
“Doing more with less” mantras are popular spin but very bad ways to run a technically based and consumer-focused government. Bad ways to run the country.
As my recent essay noted, we know companies always challenged EPA decisions and programs in court. Challenges are frequent and often quite successful.
For another, a Supreme Court adhering to so-called original textualism might rule along with the fact that the EPA was created by executive order, not by law. As we know, executive orders change with administrations. Here, one day, poof, gone another.
Fortunately, the EPA is named in subsequent Laws as an agent for implementing specific functions, but it still does not exist as a stand-alone law per se; no such EPA law was ever passed.
This is part of its problem: a complicated matter of legality, pretzel logic, function, and authority.
In truth, completely “winding down” EPA through courts would be messy, but its various functions could be divvied among other programs, and much might be done away with.
Of course, a draconian court-imposed measure may be political suicide, though with courts apparently readily willing to curb EPA authority, it may not be necessary.
Why risk that mess when many recent negative rulings involve major national environmental Laws: the Clean Water Act (several rulings post-2016), the Clean Air Act, and aspects of other Laws and programs, including the major Chevron ruling that could impact over 17,000 prior EPA rulings.
Environmental rulings are not well reported. Traditional news venues have many priorities and, in all fairness, environmental cases are highly technical and complicated. News outlets can’t adequately keep up with all that’s going on and don’t have the expertise or resources for broad coverage. They barely monitor a few major cases.
OSHA is another example. OSHA oversees worker protections across the country and includes added whistle-blower protection. It was created by Nixon in 1971 through law.
OSHA’s budget has not adjusted for inflation since that time. OSHA’s 1971 budget was $200 million. In 1996 $264 million. In 2023 $632 million.
It took OSHA 45 years to finalize a regulation lowering the allowable exposure limit of silica dust, which causes silicosis and lung cancer, in 2016.
We can go down the list of underfunded programs and gaps in adequate protections. You won’t find the information on Meta, Tiktoc, Snap Chat, or anything else.
Nor, for the most part, from major news outlets, let alone local papers, all of which are closing, losing readers and advertising dollars. None have the investigative resources they used to. All are floundering across the country.
We can agree on democracy, and freedom is not free. These examples further the typical understanding. It’s about how things work, which includes more than military or police priorities and funding, encompassing the very fabric of this great country.
Stephen Cipot
Garden City Park
