Posted on 05/09/2025 4:07:50 PM PDT by karpov
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.
"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."
(Excerpt) Read more at reason.com ...
Give me $20 freon
I was checking that pesky constitution thingie and I can’t find where the power to regulate the environment is granted to the fed...
Good article.
“They also want to limit the EPA’s use of the linear no-threshold model which assumes there’s no safe level of exposure to potentially hazardous substances.”
The linear no-threshold model does not withstand scrutiny.
The dose makes the poison.
The EPA ought to be shut down. They cost billions of dollars in regulations every year. All with minimum Congressional oversight. It was the DemocRats way of enacting far left evirowhacko rules that would never have passed in Congress. But then, that is the goal of most government agencies.
Reform? Try elimination.
That, and gas cans that actually work.
The gas can regs are clearly promulgated by someone who hates gasoline and internal combustion engines, lives urban, and never directly uses either.
Red gasoline containers now come apart at the seams after 5 years too
Rid if ethanol please
I think the ethanol is more the farm lobby (ADM lobby), and not the EPA. But yes, I would welcome the end of adulterated gasoline.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.