The Politics of the Environment: Ideas, Activism, Policy, 2nd Edition

ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY

11.2 The US Environmental Protection Agency

The EPA has responsibility for implementing all

or part of thirteen major pieces of federal

environmental legislation dealing with clean air,

solid waste disposal, safe drinking water,

pesticides, toxic substances and radiation. It is

the federal government’s largest and costliest

regulatory agency, with around 18,000

employees and a budget of just over $8 billion

in 2005. The EPA can boast some important

achievements, notably in the areas of air

quality, pesticide control and toxic waste, but it

has had a troubled history and experienced a

major onslaught from the Reagan

administration and the Republican-controlled

Congress after 1994. Major criticisms of the

EPA include:


 many missed programme deadlines


 failure to achieve numerous key regulatory

objectives


 spiralling costs of administration and

litigation


 the lack of flexibility to set its own

policy priorities


 the financial burden of regulation

Yet many of these problems arise from

inadequacies in the environmental legislation

that the EPA has to implement: the heavy

dependency on ‘command and control’

regulation, unrealistic programme objectives,

little cross-media pollution control and,

crucially, the lack of guidance on how the EPA

should allocate priorities between different

pieces of legislation and the seventy

congressional committees it has to serve. One

independent report concluded that ‘The EPA

lacks focus, in part, because Congress has

passed more than a dozen environmental

statutes that drive the agency in a dozen

directions, discouraging rational priority-setting

or a coherent approach to environmental

management’ (quoted in Rosenbaum 2006 :

173).

The pressures for change led in 1995 to the

launch of a major programme to ‘reinvent’ the

entire system of regulatory control through

greater use of community-based environmental

protection, collaborative decision-making,

public–private partnerships, enhanced flexibility

in rule-making and enforcement, and major

cuts in red tape and paperwork. Yet it has had

limited success. The agency remains strapped

by its cumbersome organisational structure

and culture, which saw its major ‘media offices’

refusing to surrender the powers and resources

required of the various reinvention initiatives.

Congress continues to lambast the EPA at

every opportunity, instead of taking on the

politically dangerous task of initiating a

fundamental restructuring of the EPA’s

regulatory mission.

Sources: Rosenbaum ( 2006 ) and EPA website

(http://www.epa.gov/).

model of a powerful cross-sectoral agency was the US Environmental Pro-

tection Agency (EPA), a federal agency formed in 1970 with legislative and

judicial backing to enforce environmental laws and regulations across states

and sectors (see Box11.2). The Swedish EPA, formed in 1967, has similarly

wide-ranging responsibilities and has also become an influential actor in

Swedish environmental policy (Lundqvist 1998 ). Other countries have opted

for a weakermodel: in Britain the wide range of agencies dealing with air-

borne, water-borne, solid and radioactive waste was gradually rationalised

until a unified, but relatively weak, Environment Agency was set up in 1996

(Carter and Lowe 1995 ;BellandGray 2002 ).