The Scandal that is the EPA

Writing on National Review Online, Henry I. Miller excoriatesthe Environmental Protection Agency.

Here’s just a sample:

…The EPA has long been more concerned with public relations than public health. An EPA scheme that was exposed in 2005 planned to divert research funds to pay outside public-relations consultants up to $5 million over five years to improve the website of its Office of Research and Development, conduct focus groups on how to polish the office’s image, and produce ghostwritten articles praising the agency “for publication in scholarly journals and magazines.”

It’s no surprise that EPA must buy good press. The agency is relentlessly inept and corrupt, and motivated by radical ideology rather than a genuine desire to protect the environment. It serves not the public interest, but the most extreme and doctrinaire environmentalists.

The EPA’s payola scheme is similar to the agency’s longstanding practice of buying influence by doling out hundreds of millions of dollars each year to non-profit organizations—money that, according to the inspector general and Government Accountability Office, is dispersed with no public notice, competition, or accountability. Specifically, they documented systematic malfeasance by regulators, including: (1) making grants to grantees who were unable to carry out the terms of the grants; (2) favoring an exclusive clique of grantees without opening the grants to competition; (3) funding “environmental” grants for activities that lack any apparent environmental benefit; and (4) failing to ensure that grantees performed the objectives identified in the grants.

Misconduct, mendacity, and conflicts of interest are just business as usual at the EPA…

With all the other governmental disasters going on, scandals that are business-as-usual at the EPA can fly under the radar. Kudos to Henry Miller for shedding light on this subject.

Read it all here.
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