Obliged to enforce myriad laws that lack built-in incentives to compliance, buffeted by literally hundreds of conflicting lawsuits, whipsawed by a congressional combination of strict legislative deadlines and skimpy budgets, and straitjacketed by OMB overseers, the Environmental Protection Agency must be the most beleaguered administrative agency in American history.¹

As if further to compound EPA's troubles, courts have recently begun to strip the Agency of its powers under existing law by narrow judicial construction. For instance, the Agency's attempts to pressure states into helping with the massive job of enforcing the Clean Air Act have recently been invalidated by two courts of appeals.²

The charge that EPA lacks legal authority to do what it sets out to do is now being taken up by a combine of industry groups and federal agencies bent on scuttling the Agency's recently drafted proposals for establishing a mandatory deposit on soft-drink and beer containers sold on federal facilities. Generally, the draft guidelines would require exaction of a minimum five-cent returnable deposit on all carbonated beverage containers sold at such federal installations as military bases, national parks, and public works projects. These proposals, not yet officially published in the Federal Register, were themselves slow to appear due to potential regulatee opposition. Although authorized by a 1970 statutory mandate,³ the guidelines were issued only under the pressure of litigation, a suit filed by environmental groups in 1974 to force EPA to obey the statutory mandate to promulgate "as soon as possible" guidelines on "solid waste recovery, collection, separation and disposal systems,"⁴ which guidelines would become binding on federal facilities upon publication in the Federal Register.⁵