Best of luck killing the EPA, U.S. Republicans
The new U. S. president and Congress are t aking a hard look at environmental rules — none harder than a freshman U. S. representative whose new bill would “terminate the Environmental Protection Agency.”
Republicans have been known to threaten this from time to time, with the understanding it was red meat for ideological interests with no real chance of success. “Everybody hates regulation,” said Christine Todd Whitman, a former EPA administrator and New Jersey governor, “because it makes you either spend money or change behaviour for a problem you may not see.”
This year, as we all know, is a little different.
Donald Trump has modulated his position on the EPA’s existence since the presidential campaign. And yet the concept that the preeminent guardian of clean air, soil, and water in the U. S. would go the way of the 20th century is now, if nothing else, no longer confined to the realm of fantasy.
Rule- of- thumb holds that once countries pollute their way into economic progress, they’ll pause for a second and check to see if they can still breathe the air and swim in the water. If not, they fix it. China is currently the leading example, with India coming up behind. There are fewer examples of nations unwinding national environmental efforts.
Internationally, the U. S. does pretty well when it comes to protecting its environment and doing its part to combat global climate change. It ranks 26 among 180 nations in the 2016 Environmental Performance Index, a collaboration of the World Economic Forum and Yale University and Columbia University researchers. That’s just worse than Canada and a bit better than the Czech Republic.
The EPA sits at the forefront of that accomplishment, such as it is. The environmental laws passed under President Richard Nixon, who helped create the agency, have cleaned up the excesses of mid- century American i ndustrialization. The laws were written to anticipate new problems, too. While the Clean Air Act doesn’t address climate change-only a small group of scientists, and far fewer if any politicians, were aware of the question back then-the stat- ute is flexible enough to address new dangers.
In July 1970, the Republ i can president cobbled together the new agency from about a dozen offices distributed throughout the federal government. Another dozen functions were reorganized into the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the biggest entity within the Department of Commerce. By creating the EPA, “I am making an exception to one of my own principles,” Nixon wrote. “That, as a matter of effective and orderly administration, additional new independent agencies normally should not be created.” But in this case, he said, there was no better option.
That many EPA functions predate the agency is one element of the department’s complexity. “( The) EPA is not an entity in the typical Washington agency sense,” said Bill Reilly, the agency’s head under Republican President George H.W. Bush. “It was established by President Nixon as an amalgamation of several different entities, from Interior and Agriculture and so forth,” he explained.
Undoing Nixon’s reorgani zation could be accomplished by another Trump executive order, Reilly said. But “what that does not take into account is that every statute I’m aware of specifically confers authority on the administrator of EPA to carry them out,” Reilly said. “And that’s true for air, water, safe drinking water, Superfund, toxics, ‘ Tosca’ (the Toxic Substances Control Act, not the opera) — the whole gamut.”
Dismembering the EPA could require Congress to change 45 years of environmental statutes, a feat that would require an enormous amount of time, organization and political capital.
Jeff Holmstead is a former EPA assistant administrator and now a partner at Bracewell LLC in Washington. Charged with the hypothetical task of dismantling the agency, he zeroed in on the two dozen or so statutes that assign responsibilities to the EPA administrator. Most of these laws have “citizen suit provisions” that let Americans sue the agency for not doing its job. “You’d have a huge mess on your hands,” he said.
Shredding the EPA would also hamstring businesses, which rely on the agency for approval and permits. The last Congress demonstrated an expanded appetite for EPA work by amending the Toxic Substances Control Act to include permitting for existing chemicals. “The chemical industry needs EPA to act,” Holmstead said.
Expec t Scott Pr ui t t , Trump’s nominee to run the agency, to preside over an EPA that ( a) continues to exist, and (b) sets to work undoing President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, Clean Water Rule, and reopening carbon pollution rules for new coal plants.
“I would predict with great confidence that those three things will happen,” Holmstead said.