Environmental Protection, in Name Only.

• Author: Miller, Henry I.
• Position: Environmental regulation seldom cost-effective - Brief Article

Federal regulations costing Americans approximately 700 billion dollars annually seem as inevitable as death and taxes. All regulations, however, are not created equal. Some are reasonably cost-effective and serve society well; others are so wrongheaded and expensive that they are actually detrimental to society.

Regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been criticized for being inefficient and unscientific. When the Office of Management and Budget analyzed the cost-effectiveness of a panoply of regulations throughout the federal government, of the thirty least cost-effective regulations on the list, seventeen had been imposed by the EPA. This impression of inefficiency is reinforced in an analysis by Washington, D.C., based Resources for the Future (RFF) of eight major EPA regulatory programs of the past two decades. REF concluded that the science behind the policy often gets distorted or ignored: "EPA for a variety of reasons is unwilling, unable, and unequipped to address and acknowledge the uncertainties in the underlying science."

The courts have often had to rein in or educate EPA officials. In May 1999, for example, a federal court ruled that the EPA's new air-quality standards were arbitrary and capricious and had to be revised. In May 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to rule on whether the EPA's policy of deliberately disregarding the cost of its regulations is required by the Clean Air Act. A public policy research institution and forty prominent economists argued persuasively in an amicus brief that the EPA should "consider explicitly the full consequences" of regulatory decisions, including costs, benefits, and any other pertinent facts.

Perhaps the most systematically egregious EPA policies have been those applied to biotechnology. The agency has been consistently at odds with scientific consensus about biotechnology's risk, choosing to focus on the most...