The Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970 by President Richard Nixon through an executive order. It was formed as an independent agency of the United States government to oversee and enact environmental protection matters.
While not an official cabinet department, the EPA administrator is normally given cabinet rank. The EPA is headquartered in Washington, D.C. however there are regional offices for each of the agency’s ten regions, as well as 27 laboratories around the country. Just under 15,000 employees currently work for the agency and its annual budget is $9,559,485,000.
According to Wikipedia, “The agency conducts environmental assessment, research, and education. It has the responsibility of maintaining and enforcing national standards under a variety of environmental laws, in consultation with state, tribal, and local governments. EPA enforcement powers include fines, sanctions, and other measures.”
The EPA delegates some permitting, monitoring, and enforcement responsibility to U.S. states and the federally recognized tribes. The agency also “works” with industries and all levels of government in a wide variety of “voluntary” pollution prevention programs and energy conservation efforts.
In reality, since its creation, the EPA has been viewed by many—especially those businesses and industries in the energy sector—as overreaching its original purpose and turning into a regulatory enforcer of nightmarish proportions.
In March, the Trump administration took steps to restructure the EPA which many news commentators and political observers are calling the the most sweeping deregulatory actions in the history of the United States.
Some 18 specific actions were announced to rein in the EPA. Needless to say, there are some out there who are not happy including most of the legacy media. MSNBC even went so far as to denounce the changes with an online article whose headline read, “Making Polluters Great Again.”
This is a positive move. “Environmental Justice” is a misnomer and has absolutely nothing to do with protecting the environment. But the rollback has other positive points that are not getting as much attention.
Some of the 18 actions include major reconsiderations of existing regulations on power plants, ending or reconsidering mandates on impossible to reach numbers on emission standard on gas vehicles, changing or ending standards on coal power generation and, essentially, paving the way for preserving grid reliability in general, thus preserving our very way of life.
Also on the chopping block is a program that demanded pointlessly detailed emission tracking from emitters of over 25,000 metric tons/year of CO2. Reconsidering it could save productive companies countless wasted millions and hours.
The goal of the new regulation changes are to free our energy producers. It’s also to protect and ensure the rule of law (and the assurance that comes with doing so) that these same producers aren’t charged as guilty of violating the never-ending stream of new regulations the EPA has been infamously known for creating and imposing. It’s also an attempt to try and steer the agency back to doing the job it was charged to do originally by Nixon: help keep the environment clean and safe and not punitively punish energy producers and cripple the nation’s power supply.
Given its history since 1970, though, that original mandate for the EPA might not be possible any longer.
That’s not to say the EPA will be a totally benign entity once “environmental justice” is removed from its regulatory apparatus and many of its other restrictions are removed. The EPA is still a power-hungry bureaucracy that gets in the way of cleaner cars that consumers might actually want to buy, focuses on carbon emissions with an almost religious zeal and, lately, often appears to be committed to turning the power off on industrial civilization while denying it the resources needed to keep it going.
“Today, as environmental concerns butt up against other values, state and local governments have generally shown themselves to be more innovative, and more respectful of private property rights, than their federal counterparts,” wrote Jonathan H. Adler, a law professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, in the December 2024 issue of Reason magazine. Adler is an advocate of abolishing the EPA and dispersing whatever its responsibilities are retained to other federal agencies, states, and localities.
He also recommends “removing existing regulatory barriers to the development and deployment of cleaner technologies and alternative energy sources.”
And that’s a good thing.
Scott Coopwood