Taming the EPA monster

Slowly, inexorably, the monster is being driven back to its lair. Its days of terrorizing villagers may soon be over. I wish I were talking about the federal government, but it’s the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), better known as the Environmental Protection-or-else Agency. At one time, it was a harmless little back-alley operation that stumbled upon a secret growth formula, downed the whole vat and began wreaking havoc. You won’t find this account on the EPA’s official website, but you will find ample evidence of the monster’s ambitions to control the world, such as its quest for “environmental justice.” On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court slapped the monster right across the chops in Sackett v. EPA. An Idaho couple, Chantell and Mike Sackett, were building a home but fell victim to an EPA compliance order in 2005. Their building permit was revoked after the EPA charged that they had violated the Clean Water Act by filling in their lot with rocks and dirt. “The Sacketts were denied any hearing to contest the Compliance Order by the EPA,” American Civil Rights Union general counsel Peter Ferrara wrote in a friend-of-the-court brief in the case. “[T]he Sacketts can ignore the EPA’s Compliance Order … That course entails incurring EPA fines of as much as $750,000 per month, $9,000,000 for a year.” The court’s unanimous decision, which overturns - yet again - a wacky 9th Circuit ruling, will allow the Sacketts to appeal the order in court instead of going through a lengthy, expensive wetlands-permit process. They might still lose, but at least they won’t be bankrupted fighting a tyrannical bureaucracy. Created on Dec. 2, 1970, the EPA began with an executive order from President Nixon that combined several clean-water and other anti-pollution agencies into one basket. The full Congress never officially approved the monster’s creation, although the plan was vetted by Senate and House committees. The newborn EPA had a budget of just more than $1 billion and 4,084 employees. Not bad for a startup. This past week, EPA Administrator Janet P. Jackson told two House Energy and Commerce subcommittees that the EPA’s 2013 budget request is $8.3 billion, a 1.2 percent decrease from 2012. The agency has 17,000 employees...more