The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) does not have a typical origin story. Congress did not create it by enacting a statute; President Richard Nixon created it by presidential edict. Perhaps that explains why it's hard to reconcile what the EPA actually does with a robust theory of the federal government's role in environmental protection.
Nixon created the agency in response to a broad sense of environmental crisis in the nation (and a desire to gain partisan advantage). Apocalyptic tracts and sensationalized events, such as the infamous and poorly understood 1969 fire on the Cuyahoga River, fed fears that environmental problems were getting inexorably worse and federal intervention was necessary. Yet before Nixon reorganized the federal bureaucracy to create the EPA, key environmental trends were already improving.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, as demand for environmental protection increased, state and local governments adopted various protective measures. By 1966, every state had adopted water pollution legislation of some sort—and key water pollution measures were improving well before the EPA got into the game. Similarly, key indicators of urban air quality were improving before the EPA appeared.
Not all these state and local measures were perfect, but that's also true of federal regulation. Today, as environmental concerns butt up against other values, state and local governments have generally shown themselves to be more innovative, and more respectful of private property rights, than their federal counterparts. (Just ask Michael and Chantell Sackett, who recently took the EPA to the Supreme Court over an EPA decision declaring the wetlands on their home lot as "waters" subject to federal regulation.)
It makes sense for the federal government to play a role to prevent some states from polluting others. Upwind and upstream jurisdictions will not stop fouling the air and water of their neighbors out of the goodness of their hearts. But this hardly requires trampling property rights or imposing detailed requirements for the management and protection of local air and water quality. Relatively little of the EPA's time is devoted to addressing interstate environmental spillovers.
There is also an argument for federal standards ensuring the safety of products sold in interstate commerce that may cause diffuse or distant harms, such as pesticides that could cause cancer. It would be wasteful for each and every jurisdiction to duplicate basic research on the environmental consequences of modern technologies. But preserving such functions within the federal government hardly requires maintaining much of the existing regulatory bureaucracy.
What about global warming? Climate change is a serious environmental concern, but here again it is not clear how the EPA helps. A revenue-neutral carbon tax rebated on a per capita basis would do quite a bit to encourage decarbonization, and it would not require tomes of environmental rules promulgated in Washington, D.C. Indeed, much climate progress could be had by simply removing existing regulatory barriers to the development and deployment of cleaner technologies and alternative energy sources.
All told, the government should spend more time trying to advance environmental protection and less time defending the authority of the EPA. Nixon did not give Uncle Sam a green thumb.
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