The EPA Is a Prime Candidate for Reform by the Trump Administration
What’s the latest federal agency drawing the scrutiny of the Trump administration for inefficiency, expense, and administrative bloat? It’s the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a federal bureaucracy long infamous for intruding into Americans’ lives and making it more difficult and expensive to do business. The EPA’s own administrator, Lee Zeldin, says the agency is overdue for reform. If he’s open to suggestions, people who have been working on the problem for years have good ideas to offer.
Anti-Science, Anti-Technology, and Anti-Industry
“Under the previous administration, EPA’s buildings stood largely empty, with headquarters attendance peaking at just over one-third occupancy as the record high attendance day last year,” Zeldin wrote in an op-ed for Newsweek published last week. “Agency spending had ballooned from around $8 billion to $10 billion to more than $63 billion. Hundreds of new chemicals remained in regulatory limbo far beyond statutory review timelines, as did more than 12,000 pesticide reviews, and 685 State Implementation Plans to improve air quality around the country.”
The EPA’s faults long precede the Biden White House. But the current administration’s openness to change and its efforts to shutter other irrelevant and overbearing federal agencies are encouraging. That’s good, because there’s a lot of fixing to be done when it comes to the EPA.
Writing for the Cato Institute in 2017, Henry I. Miller, a former FDA official, remembered his experiences with the sister agency: “I found the EPA, several of whose major programs I interacted with, to be relentlessly anti-science, anti-technology, and anti-industry. The only thing it seemed to be for was the Europeans’ innovation-busting ‘precautionary principle,’ the view that until a product or activity has been proven safe definitively, it should be banned or at least smothered with regulation.”
In consequence, he added, the EPA “killed off entire, once-promising sectors of U.S. research and development.”
Abolish the EPA and Leave It to
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