The State of Environmental Protection

There is a general consensus that the current federal regulatory system is broken and needs repair. Whether or not federal regulations deserve credit for the successes of the past three decades, they are no longer capable of delivering environmental progress at an acceptable cost. "The current system, consisting mainly of end-of-pipe, technology-based regulations, is inadequate for the challenges ahead," observed Karl Hausker, director of the Enterprise for the Environment project, in these pages.¹ The most recent report on environmental policy from the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA), Environment.Gov, concurred: "The regulatory programs in place in this country simply cannot address [current environmental] problems at a price America can afford."² A recent top-to-bottom review of environmental regulation by Resources for the Future also reached the same conclusions, finding the existing system of pollution control fragmented and inefficient, overly rigid and unnecessarily complex.³ This report found that many existing regulations impose excessive costs to generate meager returns, and that such problems are often due to inadequate information and poor prioritization.

These are hardly exceptional views. The U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations reports that "federal rules and procedures governing decision-making for protecting the environment often are complex, conflicting, difficult to apply, adversarial, costly, inflexible and uncertain."⁴ The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) alone accounts for nearly 10% of all of the federal government's regulatory activity; approximately one in five new EPA regulations are expected to cost over $ 100 million a piece to implement.⁵ All told, federal environmental rules cost an estimated $ 148 billion.⁶ Yet EPA regulations are substantially less cost effective, in terms of dollars expended per life saved, than those of other agencies, in some cases by orders of magnitude.⁷ Moreover, EPA does a poor job of establishing priorities in accordance with independent evaluations of public health risks and environmental needs.⁸ When it comes to environmental regulations, Americans pay too much and get too little.