Environmental Protection Agency Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was established under President Nixon’s Reorganization Act 3 of 1970. The creation of the EPA was part of a sweeping transformation of American environmental regulation that is often credited to the social movements that evolved around growing public and scientific awareness of environmental crises. The publication of Silent Spring, the burning of the Cuyahoga River in Ohio, and the Santa Barbara oil spill are often cited as significant events, which crystallized mainstream opinion around the need for a strong federal regulatory hand in ensuring environmental quality.

Strong federal environmental roles were minted in landmark laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act (1969), the Clean Air Act (1970), the Clean Water Act (1972), and the Endangered Species Act (1973). The EPA was created as an independent agency to administer many of these laws: few believed that the Department of Commerce, for example, could fairly and firmly regulate polluting industries that it was simultaneously promoting and protecting through trade policy.

Another narrative concerning the federalization of environmental regulation puts less stress on the achievements of environmental social movements, pointing to the fact that these movements were still nascent-and drowned out by antiwar and other social movements-at the time of these laws’ passage and the EPA’s founding. Regulated energy industries, which faced a welter of individual state-level regulations, also called for federal environmental regulation. These industries felt that the best longterm strategy would be to use their established influence with politicians, like Senator Edwin Muskie, to proactively shape the environmental debate and the ultimate form of federal environmental regulation. This would give regulated industries a single target, rather than 50 different targets, when attempting to influence environmental regulation. It has also been suggested that the founding of the EPA was the result of competition between President Nixon and Democrat senators with their eyes on the 1972 presidential election, over who would be perceived as “more environmentalist.” Because no political benchmarks concerning environmentalism existed, Nixon and his competitors continued to try and out-do each other.

Major Tasks

The EPA is charged with executing many of the major environmental laws and programs including (but not limited to) the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Ocean Dumping Act, the Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA-also known as “Superfund”), the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Emergency Preparedness and Community Right-to-Know Act, and the Solid Waste Disposal Act. Although executing many of these laws entails regulatory duties and the ability to ensure compliance and pursue enforcement, the EPA has also developed broad nonregulatory programs in education, information provision, and the delivery of federal money to state, tribal, and local environmental programs. As the political enthusiasm for environmental enforcement has waned with the growth of the Wise Use and Sagebrush Rebellion movements, the EPA’s regulatory and enforcement activities have been deemphasized at the expense of such grants and voluntary programs. The administration of the Toxic Release Inventory, which provides information to the public on sources of toxins in their locales, and the $15 million in grants given each year to develop state-level wetland protection programs, are popular examples of nonregulatory EPA programs.

The EPA was pieced together largely through the transfer of staff and existing programs from other areas of the executive branch, such as the Departments of Health, Education, and Welfare (which had regulated air pollution, water hygiene and solid waste), and the Food and Drug Administration (which had regulated pesticides). From the beginning, the EPA was divided organizationally into six areas: air, water, toxics, solid waste, research and development, and enforcement. The current organizational structure still reflects indecision as to whether to organize by medium (air and water) or by regulated substance (solid waste and toxins).

Each of the 12 headquarters offices and 10 regions are headed by a politically appointed assistant administrator, with one politically appointed deputy and one career deputy. The EPA is thus rather thickly invested with political appointees relative to its size. This is perhaps because many of the environmental laws it executes are potentially quite powerful and disruptive to the economy and industry. The deep penetration of political appointees ensures that agency actions are considered in the light of (and often constrained by) political policy considerations. The fact that policy decisions are made at the headquarters level under relatively close political supervision has produced an enduring tension between the regions (often staffed by career environmental scientists) and headquarters (where staff are largely lawyers and policy specialists).

The influence of political decisions was evident in the notorious incident in which President Reagan’s appointed EPA administrator, Anne Burford, was charged with contempt of Congress. She and many other EPA appointees resigned after refusing to provide a congressional investigation with documentation relevant to potential conflicts of interest in administration of the Superfund toxic cleanup program. Although the respected first administrator, William Ruckleshaus, was brought back to the post in an attempt to restore the reputation of the agency, the Burford legacy has persisted as a deep cynicism among environmentalists concerning the political nature of EPA regulatory activities. Staff members, often sympathetic to environmental causes, have occasionally leaked sensitive documents to journalists or environmental nonprofits, and the regional staff has an often-contentious relationship with the headquarters management in Washington. In both Democrat and Republican administrations, it has been common for the EPA to use its regulatory and enforcement powers only lightly or selectively, often waiting until a lawsuit from an environmental advocacy organization forces it into more direct compliance with its regulatory mandates.

The EPA is a standalone federal agency, unaffiliated with any department, and this isolated institutional position has been both a strength and a challenge. On the one hand, it is beholden to no constituency in the way that the Department of Commerce must both serve and regulate industry, or that the Department of the Interior must both serve and regulate resource extraction. However, within the hierarchy of the executive branch, the EPA’s lack of affiliation and lack of powerful civil-society constituents puts it at a disadvantage in budget and allocation decisions.

The EPA is a popular target for cuts and lacks private-sector interests who will argue for Congressional augmentation of a spare White House proposed budget. However, as its regulatory duties have been muted in recent administrations, its role as a distributor of federal money to state environmental programs has grown, and the EPA has used its alliances outside the federal government to aid its political position within the executive branch. Nonetheless, the institutional culture of the EPA is one of caution, consultation, and networking: rapid unilateral or aggressive action is the exception. This is arguably inimical to the goal of achieving the dramatic environmental improvements sought in the laws the agency executes.

Bibliography:

Tristan Boyer Boyer Binns, EPA: Environmental Protection Agency (Heinemann, 2002);
Robert W. Collin, The Environmental Protection Agency: Cleaning up America’s Act (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2005);
Environmental Protection Agency website, www.epa.gov