Point-counterpoint: Is the EPA worth saving?

Yahoo

14-04-2025

Editor's note: The following point-counterpoint appears in the April 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.
Do we still need the Environmental Protection Agency?
We need the EPA like the skies are blue, the rivers clear and the soil safe for growing food. That broadly describes the country we inhabit today, but only about a fourth of Americans were born before 1965, old enough to remember our dingiest days. The agency's own archive of 'before' photos, captured during its early days in the 1970s, offers a stark warning of unchecked oil spills, discarded chemicals and burning waterways. That was before the EPA became a fierce regulator, requiring companies and governments to manage their impact on natural resources.
Public health should be reason enough to maintain a strong EPA. Each year, the agency keeps more than 700 billion pounds of toxic pollutants out of public waters and prevents hundreds of thousands of premature deaths by enforcing the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act (though a Supreme Court decision curtailed water regulations in March). The EPA also works to identify unsafe products like cancer-causing pesticides and other hazardous substances, and bar them from interstate commerce.
Only the federal government can address threats that don't respect lines on a map. More than 40 states share rivers — and water quality concerns — with their neighbors. At least half of all air pollution crosses state lines. States would be relatively powerless to handle such challenges on their own, assuming they were willing to do so. One reason the EPA was created 'was the recognition that without a set of federal standards to protect public health from environmental pollution, states would continue to compete for industrial development by taking short cuts on environmental protection,' writes William D. Ruckelshaus, EPA administrator under President Richard Nixon and President Ronald Reagan, in The New York Times.
The EPA is an efficient investment in the environment, centralizing and streamlining research into the impacts of new products. Two-thirds want the government to do more to reduce the effects of climate change. The EPA advances climate science, measures emissions, negotiates climate initiatives with the private sector, partners with states and foreign governments and advocates for robust but workable regulations. All this with a relatively modest 2025 fiscal year budget of $11 billion, about 0.7 percent of federal spending.
The EPA is a paragon of federal overreach, an all-too-visible hand that interferes with the free market and places uncomfortable limits on the American people and their business. The agency determines everything from what cars we can buy to whether families can build homes on their own property. Its meddling makes energy more costly, increasing prices from food to electronics and construction. Meanwhile, news headlines often reflect the agency's failures to protect us from threats like dangerous pesticides and microplastics.
Taxpayers bear the cost. The agency's 2025 budget is large enough to build 10 Hoover Dams. Its inflated bureaucracy increases the likelihood of government waste and error. 'Many large bureaucratic organizations are inefficient, but the EPA is in a class by itself,' writes Henry Miller of the Pacific Research Institute, a free market think tank, for The New York Times. 'The EPA also misuses taxpayer money, sometimes diverting funds meant for research to things like public relations consultants to burnish its image instead.'
The EPA also contributes to a regulatory burden that is stifling American industry. An average U.S. company pays about $10,000 per employee every year to comply with federal regulations. That number bumps up to almost $20,000 for manufacturers and $35,000 for small manufacturers. Every dollar they can save in this regard could boost the economy and drive innovation. Instead, EPA policies impede private enterprise from developing environmental solutions of their own.
Environmental oversight should go back to the states, where it belongs. They saw to such laws and regulations before the EPA was signed into existence, and even now, most day-to-day environmental decisions impacting communities tend to be localized. We don't need an additional federal arm to step in the way. '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,' Jonathan H. Adler, a Case Western Reserve University law professor, writes for Reason magazine.
A Pew Research Center survey last year found that about half of Americans prefer a smaller government that offers fewer resources, and 56 percent believe the government is 'almost always wasteful and inefficient.'