Already under a gag order preventing them from communicating with the press or using social media and facing the threat of funding cuts, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) could be eliminated altogether under a new bill proposed last week by a Florida congressman.
The bill, HR 861, is a proposed law introduced by Florida Republican Matt Gaetz on February 3 that would “terminate” the EPA. While the full text of the bill was not available as of Sunday, it would transfer regulatory power to the states, according to the Pensacola (Fla.) News Journal.
As NBC News reported, while President Donald Trump has proposed reducing EPA funding by as much as $800 million, Gaetz’s bill would see that the agency is abolished by the end of 2018, and it comes two months after Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt (who has filed a total of 14 lawsuits against the EPA) was selected by Trump to lead the organization.
“When it was originally created, states and local communities didn’t have the technology or expertise to protect the environment,” Gaetz told the News Journal Friday “We’ve come a long way in the last 50 years. Time and again, I’ve seen constituents unknowingly subject themselves to the oppressive jurisdiction of the EPA by doing simple things.”
The bill has been co-sponsored by congressmen Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Steven Palazzo of Mississippi and Barry Loudermilk of Georgia, all Republicans, Gizmodo said. While Massie told the News Journal that the EPA needs to be eliminated because it “makes rules that undermine the voice of the American people and threaten jobs in Kentucky,” Gizmodo noted that the new bill is thus far short on detail regarding how the dismantling procedure would work.
Could states handle the burden of environmental regulation?
The bill has been submitted to the House Committee on Natural Resources, where the chairman of the committee, Utah Rep. Rob Bishop, will determine whether or not it will be put to a vote. While Gaetz is confident that environmental regulatory power would simply shift to the states if the EPA is disbanded, legal experts told the News Journal that might not be the case.
“A lot of states just don’t have resources available to them,” said Mary Jane Angelo, a professor at the University of Florida Levin College of Law and the director of its Environmental and Land Use Law Program. “Wealthier states would have better protection for their citizens’ health than poorer states,” and if the agency were eliminated, “decisions would have to be made on hundreds of programs about what happens to them,” she added.
Without federal oversight, states would begin “a race to the bottom,” added Alyson Flournoy, a UF law professor a member scholar at the liberal Center for Progressive Reform. Without having it as an incentive to attract industry, many states would relax environmental guidelines as part of an ill-advised short-term economic strategy that could significantly harm public health, she said.
The move “seems to be part of a wave from elected officials designed to capture headlines but not do good government,” Flournoy told the newspaper. However, Gaetz, argued in an email he sent to colleagues that his bill would cut overhead at the federal level, citing statistics from the right-leaning American Action Forum claiming that it takes more than 94,000 full-time workers earning an average of $33 per hour to complete one year of EPA paperwork.
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