Jay Lehr writes at Human Events:
We could eliminate 80 percent of EPA’s bloated $8 billion budget and return the money to the people. The remaining 20 percent could be used to fund EPA’s research labs and pull together a committee of the 50 state environmental protection departments to take over EPA’s other responsibilities.
A relatively small administrative structure is all that is necessary to enable the states to work together. The states would have the incentive and the means to act as environmental stewards without the power to impose scientifically unjustified, economically punitive restrictions on a national basis.
We could phase out EPA in five years. It would take one year to prepare the new structure and then four years to phase out the various EPA bureaucracy and programs. As each EPA program is phased out, the committee of the whole would assume the phased-out oversight and responsibilities.
The fact is maintenance is less labor intensive than repair. After the initial correction of the problems created by decades of environmental abuse the EPA should have been downsized to a maintenance level. The same is true of the CDC, FDA, and myriad other executive agencies. Rather than admit they’ve done their jobs effectively they scramble to find reasons to expand their purview and justify their continued growth.
How about five days?
That’s a reasonable description of the situation MT. I’m old enough to remember what the US environment was like before King Nixon signed the EPA into law. We had rivers that caught fire because they were so full of discarded solvents. Most streams near cities and towns were visibly polluted. Every harbor was an open sewer. The air was brown and stinky in many areas.
The EPA has it’s problems chasing increasingly trivial issues. Saying that the whole program is a failure would be absurd. I would not want us to go back to the unregulated conditions of the 1960s. Jay Lehr’s proposal seems plausible… Until you have the first cross-border dispute. You’ll still need national regulation of interstate pollution.
Now that I’ve been sarcastic, I’ll be fair.
There’s a legitimate federal role in environmental issues. Air and water go where they go, crossing borders willy-nilly and everyone does live downstream and downwind. Real pollution does cause harm both tangible and less tangible.
Just as profit without consideration of harm is foolish and maybe even immoral, so mitigation without consideration of cost can be.
Sounds like a good start. However, if state EPAs will still get funding from DC, then control from DC will still be there and will still be corrupting and coercive.
I thought he meant to actually kill its function. In which case, I wanted to quote Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit): “Faster, please.”