The EPA Is a Prime Candidate for Reform by the Trump Administration

The federal agency has a history of overreaching its authority and threatening liberty.

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.

Anti-Science, Anti-Technology, and Anti-Industry

"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."

In consequence, he added, the EPA "killed off entire, once-promising sectors of U.S. research and development."

Abolish the EPA and Leave It to the States?

Jonathan Adler, a professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, addressed exactly that point in Permitting the Future, a paper published last year. He wrote that "legal requirements adopted at all levels of government for the purpose of ensuring environmental review, facilitating public participation, and limiting environmental harm have become obstacles to continued environmental progress." That is, environmental regulation stands in the way of cleaner technologies that can make the world a better, greener place to live—if bureaucrats get out of the way.

Following up on that theme in the December 2024 issue of Reason, Adler argued that to the extent environmental regulation should exist, it ought not be at the federal level: "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."

That doesn't mean states and localities are immune to excess or bad regulation. But Adler suggests that they're less bad and closer to the people they affect. He recommended abolishing the EPA.

A Detailed Blueprint for Reform

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) shares such concerns, which are reflected in its Modernizing the EPA: A Blueprint for Congress project, edited by Daren Bakst and Marlo Lewis.

"The EPA is supposed to protect the nation's environment, but it has become an agency that uses this mission as a means to regulate major portions of the economy and affect how we live our lives," Bakst and Lewis caution. "The EPA is well known for ignoring the will of Congress, and this problem is only getting worse. The agency also acts as if the only thing that matters is achieving whatever environmental objective it is pursuing, without properly considering the costs and tradeoffs of its actions and the harm it can cause Americans."

Like Miller and Adler, Bakst and Lewis write that the EPA fails to properly consider costs and tradeoffs and ignores the role of the states in protecting the environment. While not going as far as Adler's call to pull the plug on the EPA, CEI recommends deep reforms in how the EPA operates to trim its overreach and make it less dangerous to American liberty and prosperity.

As did Miller, CEI's contributors suggest that many of the EPA's "scientific" assumptions are junk. They also claim the agency's worst overreach is in the realm of enforcing the Clean Air Act and that in the process of regulating the nation's water, "The EPA, along with the US Army Corps of Engineers…have consistently ignored the role of states and the importance of private property rights."

The blueprint's contributors recommend that Congress require the EPA to use accurate climate models, ease permitting, and "require the EPA to abandon the precautionary principle." The EPA should not be allowed to close types of businesses or ban goods. 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.

Over the course of 232 pages plus endnotes, CEI offers a detailed plan for reforming not just how the EPA wields its authority, but even the philosophical foundations it brings to the job.

"Congress should ensure that the EPA is focused on protecting Americans from genuine environmental harms," the blueprint concludes. "This is not merely about limiting the agency's regulatory abuses. It is also about ensuring that the agency is not using funding in a manner not intended by Congress."

The best approach, I believe, is the one recommended by Adler: getting rid of the EPA entirely so that a trimmed bureaucracy can't metastasize in the future back to its old malignancy, like an overlooked tumor. An abolished bureaucracy is the least dangerous type of bureaucracy.

But if that's too big an ask for Congress and the Trump administration, CEI's Modernizing the EPA offers a good plug-and-play plan for reforming the agency and making it less dangerous. That would still leave a smaller and, hopefully, better-focused bureaucracy in place, but some improvement is better than none.

Zeldin and the Trump administration got off to a good start when they redirected the EPA from the trendy social justice ideological pursuits it adopted under the last administration. At that time, the new management announced efforts "to ensure that enforcement does not discriminate based on race and socioeconomic status (as it has under environmental justice initiatives)."

If that energy can be brought to reforming the whole EPA or (preferably) abolishing it, the country will be better off.