If they don't like the mission of a President, they just move as slowly as possible. They collude using non-government email addresses, like former EPA Administrators Lisa P. Jackson and Carol Browner. If they have a hidden agenda, they can release the names of 80,000 farm employees to environmental groups, including known eco-terrorists, and say they made a mistake.
Given the majority of the 18,000 employees voted against his party, that will be a challenge.
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Credit: Earth.org
Yet there is good news also. When EPA groups are run by scientists, they are no less ethical than academia or the corporate sector. I have actually enjoyed talking to EPA scientists and asking how they felt when a new administration comes in and wants a new review of a product they just re-approved. They just shrug their shoulders and do the work all over again.
If EPA gets back to that, we can leave the disasters of the recent past behind. Here are three things Administrator Zeldin can do to have a big impact right away, and earn back trust the public has lost.
1. Bring back the science. During the Biden years, scientists were replaced by epidemiologists and epidemiologists ignore pesky real world things like plausible biological mechanisms and toxoicology and chemistry. If they can parse spreadsheet data and "link" X to Y and declare statistical significance they publish in Environmental Health Perspectives, the in-house journal of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, which is often devoted to undermining science, and start calling for bans.
EPA is not NIEHS, it needs to be grounded in science. If Marine Fisheries or one of the other Services wants to bring in epidemiologists and claim everything ir "correlated" to a problem, let them do it, but EPA needs to be scientific, the way they were before the Biden years.
2. Roll back epidemiology-based regulations that replaced science using now-illegal Chevron Deference
Imagine a world where partisdans in government don't want to do yet another review of a chemical they want to ban, because all of the other reviews failed to show harm except in ranks force-fed it using tubes into their stomachs, so they instead go to court and ask the court to undo their own science-based regulations. The court, as baffled as the public is by that logic, agreed to allow EPA to vacate...itself...and then EPA created new regulations - based on epidemiology, not science - which mandated trace levels so low a product cannot be used.
Using Chevron Deference, the BIden administration was able to create de facto bans on chemicals that Democrats dislike - they flipped to the pro- side on vaccines in 2021, not everything else - and that's bad for public health. The Biden administration may lost more high-profile court cases per day running the country than any president in history but he threw so many regulations using agencies at the world it still did a lot of harm. Administrator needs to stop EPA culture of exploiting loopholes in the law to advance an agenda against corporations.(1)
3. Do not volunteer to act out of character for other agencies or the White House.
It would be odd for EPA to volunteer to help the Department of Education block illegal immigrants from being deported. Yet during the Biden years they volunteered to send heavily-armed federal Marshals onto family farms to force inspections of man-made ponds used for watering cattle to create an "icy chill" about the president's drastic expansion of the Waters of the United States law, which was already found unconstitutional during the Obama attempt. President Biden changed a few words and enacted again and it was immediately challenged in court, but before it could even be heard former Administration Michael Regan, a generational progressive bureaucrat, was declaring family farms "navigable waters" of the United States.
Obviously, a pond on a farm is not carrying a battleship but the Biden EPA so tortured both law and intent that they declared pond water could seep into the soil, run into a river, and into the ocean and therefore armed federal agents terrifying families was necessary.
There are obviously more things that need fixed. For example, EPA should stop making poor people pay more for cars by exempting states like California from emissions laws so they can force fuel companies to make special formulations that drive up the cost. Allies in media are now claiming there is no electric car mandate but there obviously is if you tell car companies how many electric vehicles to sell - or else. That needs to be gone so electric cars can win or lose on a fair playing field. The same with solar panels and windmills and nuclear energy. No more picking winners and losers by government fiat.
But these three things would make everything else possible, including mitigating climate change, and I look forward to seeing his progress.
NOTES:
(1) Corporations saved us during COVID-19, something the Biden administration took credit for, but only after claiming Trump was risking American lives by fast-tracking approval in 20202 because Trump said that FDA didn't need to spend 18 months thinking about the font of the label before approving products.
Seriously, there is a reason drug approvals now take a decade and cost a billion dollars, meaning only Big Pharma can survive the process and small companies with new products sell to them. That reason is FDA mechanisms from the Clinton years.
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