Resolution Urging Congress to Replace the Environmental Protection Agency Exposed

The Resolution Urging Congress to Replace the Environmental Protection Agency is a draft model policy considered by ALEC's Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force at the States and Nation Policy Summit on December 5, 2014. Due to incomplete information, it is not known if the bill passed in a vote by legislators and lobbyists at ALEC task force meetings, if ALEC sought to distance itself from the bill as the public increased scrutiny of its pay-to-play activities, or if key operative language from the bill has been introduced by an ALEC legislator in a state legislature in the ensuing period or became binding law. The bill language below is from a ALEC 35 day mailer, available here.

ALEC Bill Text

Summary

This resolution requests Congress replace the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), with a committee composed of representatives of the environmental protection agencies of the 50 states over a five-year transition period. The EPA was created at a time when a number of states had no agencies devoted to protecting the environment, and those that did have such agencies were underfunded and weak. Many of the environmental problems of the day were severe and were beyond the power of any individual state agency to address. The public demanded action and Congress responded by creating EPA in 1971.

The environmental laws which followed in the immediate aftermath of the creation of the EPA were based on federalism. The EPA defined the scope of the problem and set environmental quality goals to be met while states were charged with meeting the goals with input by EPA. Unfortunately, in fewer than 10 years, environmental lobbyists realized they could use EPA to advance a liberal political agenda, shaping the economy and individual choices to their liking.

Over the past 30 years, as a recent Senate minority report indicated, EPA has become an almost wholly owned subsidiary of the liberal environmental movement. At the same time, state environmental agencies have significantly matured. Greater expertise and increased budgets have made them capable of defining and proposing solutions to the environmental problems they face in light of local concerns and localized knowledge and values. Now is the time for states to experiment and become the engines of environmental innovation as they have in economic innovation.

Model Resolution

WHEREAS, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was formed when the major environmental problems facing the people were large in scale, national in scope, and when state environmental protection agencies, where they existed, were relatively new, small, and underfunded, and thus often ill-equipped to deal with local or state environmental problems that were decades in the making;

WHEREAS, EPA’s early efforts were largely successful in alleviating the significant air, water quality, and waste disposal issues facing Americans, so that despite considerable economic improvement, today’s air and water quality are better than at any time in the past century;

WHEREAS, the nation’s major environmental laws were established within a federalist system, wherein, for the most part, EPA defined degrees of environmental threat where such threats existed, established reasonable standards, and set goals and timetables to minimize the impacts air, water, and toxic pollutants had on the public and the environment; and the environmental agencies were charged with determining how those goals were to be met, monitoring regulated entities to ensure that the procedures established by each state were met, working with regulated entities to help them meet the goals, and established and enforced civil and/or criminal penalties for recalcitrant polluters;

WHEREAS, this federalist system has worked, but EPA has attained the lion’s share of the credit while state agencies have done the vast majority of the work;

WHEREAS, most of the supposed remaining health threats are extrapolated from flawed epidemiological studies and ignore animal and human laboratory studies which show that current air quality and air quality standards are protective of human health and the environment, that the negligible concentrations of potentially toxic compounds to which the public may be exposed do not constitute a health threat, communities throughout the nation have access to drinking water that is among the cleanest and safest in the world, and water quality in general continues to improve;

WHEREAS, numerous studies demonstrate that beginning in the early 1980s, EPA began to be influenced by or became collaborative with radical elements in environmental activist groups, who over time have infiltrated EPA to the extent that it is now an almost wholly owned subsidiary of the radical environmental movement;

WHEREAS, public choice and new resource economics show that EPA regulators’ jobs and power depend on a continued public perception that air and water pollution and toxic releases remain serious and urgent problems;

WHEREAS, regulators, in conjunction with environmental activists, also set the level of health standards, allowing them to decide when the work is finished. And the combination of the quest for control and the bureaucratic incentives built into environmental quality regulations dictate that the EPA pursue tiny or nonexistent health benefits at great cost;

WHEREAS, recent and recently proposed regulations and rules including but not limited to: new Ozone standards, the Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, the proposed carbon dioxide standards for new and existing power plants, new and unreasonably stringent short-term ambient air quality standards for nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide, new rules targeting coal-fired boilers such as Boiler MACT, new rules targeting stationary internal combustion engines, and the new WOTUS rule all come with huge costs, but there is no evidence that they will provide any measurable benefit to human health, quality of life, or the environment;

WHEREAS, the rules themselves threaten electric power reliability and will increase the cost of energy and the vast majority of food and consumer goods, thereby harming the poor and those on fixed incomes. Ultimately, these rules pose a direct threat to property rights and are a greater threat to human health than the harms they are purported to prevent;

WHEREAS, environmental quality is a demand of all Americans, but environmental problems, where they remain, vary in type and severity, and the best, least costly solutions are likely to be found more quickly with experimentation, innovation, and competition between state agencies working with industry counterparts than in a highly-bureaucratic, centralized, environmental agency in Washington, D.C., far removed from the day-to-day problems and issues confronting disparate state and regional populations;

WHEREAS, state environmental agencies have long borne the majority of the responsibility for shaping, establishing, carrying out, and enforcing the nation’s environmental laws and have proven themselves as leaders in establishing high-environmental quality standards.

NOW THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED THAT, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) requests Congress replace the United States Environmental Protection Agency, with a Committee made up of representatives of the environmental protection agencies of the 50 states over a five-year transition period.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, the committee of the 50 states would consist of six delegate employees from each of the 50 states, with a final committee of 300 replacing the 15,000 employees currently employed by EPA. EPA would be phased out over five years, with a oneyear preparation period followed by a four-year program in which 25 percent of the agency's activities would be passed to the Committee of the Whole each year. Simultaneously, the federal budget for environmental protection would be reduced from $8.2 billion to $2 billion, and the new committee’s headquarters would be centrally located in the Mid-West to allow the closest contact with the highest number of individual states and to reduce travel costs from the states to the central headquarters of the Committee of the Whole.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, the Committee of the Whole would determine which regulations are actually mandated in law by Congress and which were established by EPA without congressional approval. Rules written clearly into legislation would be recommended for continuance or would be included in a request to Congress to have them eliminated because the Committee of the Whole deems them unnecessary in their current form. Regulations not supported by writings within legislation would be considered by the applicable subcommittees and the whole committee for alteration or repeal by a two-thirds vote of the Committee of the Whole.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, the Committee of the Whole shall be enjoined to produce a State of America’s Environment report, at minimum, every five years for submission to Congress. This report shall: detail improvement and/or deterioration in the environment utilizing scientifically-sound metrics, compare the current state of the environment across all media with the state of environment over the previous 50 years or more, examine the economic costs of regulatory programs in place, and recommend changes, if any, to the existing regulatory structure.