Most supporters of the Environmental Protection Agency assume it exists to, well, protect the US environment. But there's an argument to be made that environmental protection isn't the agency's purpose at all.
In fact, evidence shows us that the purpose of the federal government since its founding has primarily been to protect business. The very first act of Congress in 1789 was a tariff (the same stupid thing Trump does). This tariff favored American ships by charging them lower cargo fees (6 cents per ton) than foreign ships (50 cents per ton. Not only that, but coastal trade was limited by this Tariff Act of 1789 only to American ships.
That was the very first action taken by the US government: to protect US business. And it's been going on ever since.
Fast forward to January 2017. A website called EZGovOpps (one of many companies capitalizing on the government's habit of taking money from us to give to groveling corporations) writes the following OpEd: “Cutting the EPA would hurt small government contractors.” Because that's actually what the EPA does: it doesn't protect anything. It awards money to government contractors, just like most other government agencies do.
EZGovOpps was trying to appeal to the Trump administration by using the argument that eliminating EPA funds would hurt small business: “A cut to the EPA’s funding would disproportionally affect these many small businesses. Though each individual business is small, the full economic effect is enormous: small businesses are awaiting future payments totaling over $2 billion from the EPA.”
Just two years earlier, one of the agency's top contractors, Missouri-based Environmental Restoration LLC, was doing contract clean-up for the EPA when 3 million gallons of toxic mining waste spilled, polluting Colorado’s Animas River with lead, arsenic, and cadmium.
Now, it's not a bad thing that a company has gone into the business of toxic cleanup. The problem arises in when the government then involves itself in that very same industry. When determining the cause of the spill, it was unclear whether negligence had occurred on the part of the company or on the part of the EPA, itself. In fact, Kate Zimmerman, the public lands policy director at the National Wildlife Foundation, placed the blame squarely on the EPA rather than its contractor.
Regardless of which entity was ultimately at fault, the EPA has paid Environmental Restoration hundreds of millions of dollars over the last several years. The business of the agency is to distribute funds, first and foremost. For what and in what manner is secondary.
The EPA, like any other government agency, is all about funneling money to friendly, well-connected corporations and EZGovOpps' argument is that industry “buckets” have developed under these EPA faucets. If that funding is cut, those industries risk collapse. That's because the EPA supports corporations, not the environment.
And with Trump in office, the EPA just as much a swamp as its ever been. Samantha Dravis, the EPA’s senior counsel until she resigned last April, met with close to 100 corporate representatives in 2017. Emails made public from a Sierra Club lawsuit show that Dravis had only one scheduled meeting with a representative of an environmental or public health organization during the same time period.
Which brings us to the crux of the regulator-as-savior problem: many of us think that regulating agencies are there to penalize corporations that fail to comply with their various regulations. The truth is, only some are penalized. Government regulations are put in place by embedded corporations (sometimes the laws defining these regulations are written by these corporations) that stand to benefit from the penalties their competitors are then forced to pay.
Here's the takeaway: these regulations aren't worded to protect the environment, but rather to create loopholes with which to punish non-government-connected companies that are competitors of government-connected companies.
And how many paid EPA contractors actually do work out in the physical environment “saving” it? Last year, the agency hired a consulting firm to help with the agency's “media affairs.” It supports several security guard, janitorial, and food service contractors, not to mention funding study after study. But how much of these billions of dollars the agency spends actually end up improving air and water quality? And how much of these expenditures actually offset environmental protection?
And, of course, now the EPA is being run by Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist. And we continue to look to the government to save our environment... why?
