Make it go back to what it was before it was created.
That's wrong. Totally wrong.
Between 1948 and 1970 Congress passed, and Presidents signed, the following laws:
Air
1955: Air Pollution Control Act PL 84-159
1963: Clean Air Act PL 88-206
1965: Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control Act PL 89-272
1966: Clean Air Act Amendments PL 89-675
1967: Air Quality Act PL 90-148
Water
1948: Water Pollution Control Act PL 80-845
1965: Water Quality Act PL 89-234
1966: Clean Waters Restoration Act PL 89-753
Land
1964: Wilderness Act PL 88-577
1968: Wild and Scenic Rivers Act PL 90-542
1970: Wilderness Act PL 91-504
Endangered species
1946: Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act PL 79-732
1966: Endangered Species Preservation Act PL 89-669
1969: Endangered Species Conservation Act PL 91-135
Hazardous waste
1965: Solid Waste Disposal Act PL 89-272
1970: Resource Recovery Act PL 91-512
All of these laws delegated Congress's lawmaking powers to the President and to the Executive Departments. Bu the time Nixon created the EPA by executive order, attempts to enforce these many laws were occurring in multiple departments, e.g., Justice, Commerce, Agriculture, Interior, Labor, Health Education and Welfare, and bureaucracy was growing iike mad.
Nixon's rationale for an EPA was to consolidate and coordinate all these enforcement activities into a single place, to eliminate waste, duplication of effort, and conflict over the meaning of the laws.
Now, of course, EPA turned into a monster. But the fault (as usual) lies with Congress for passing vague laws and then conferring its SOLE legislative power to unelected officials, thereby getting the best of both worlds: Attack "bureaucrats" at election time, tell aggrieved constituents "there's nothing I can do about it" most of the time.
I was once very interested in abolishing the EPA. But the problem is that, once the EPA is abolished, all the laws it is charged with enforcing will still exist.
Unless the Clean Air Act, the Water Quality Act, and the two Endangered Species Acts are repealed, the problem of the EPA is going to continue to exist in one form or another.
“Make it go back to what it was before it was created.”
I have to disagree with you there. The EPA helped clean up a lot of serious environmental messes and did good work with air quality before it became totally politicized by the far-left for their global warming scams as well as becoming an active participant in a lawyer-led shakedown industry.
I remeber as a child in 1969 in Cleveland, Ohio when an oil slick and trash on the Cuyahoga River - polluted from decades of industrial waste - caught fire on a Sunday morning in June near the Republic Steel mill. The fire causing about $100,000 ($700 K today) worth of damage to two railroad bridges. The ‘69 fire was not even the first time that the river burned. Dating back to the beginning of the twentieth century, the river had caught fire on several other occasions.
I grew up in Montana so I never experienced serious air pollution but I remeber watching the news seeing the brown clouds over L.A., New York, Chicago, etc.
Trust me, we don’t want mercury, lead, arsenic, and solid waste in our water or sulfur-dioxide, lead, and tones of soot particulates in our air.