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| Jay Lehr, Ph.D. Photo: Ileana Johnson 2015 |
In his opinion, the 15,000 employees based in Washington,
D.C. and in regional offices around the country “do not do useful work
whatsoever.” Dr. Lehr names himself the
“most competent person on the planet” to write a proposal for the elimination
of the EPA, saving the taxpayers $6.2 billion annually and improving the
environmental protection” because he is the “only scientist alive that played a
major role in establishing the EPA.”
Among the many pieces of legislation Dr. Lehr helped write
are included the Water Pollution Control Act (later renamed the Clean Water
Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, Surface
Mining and Reclamation Act, Clear Air Act, Federal Insecticide, Rodenticide, and Fungicide Act,
and Comprehensive Environmental Response
Compensation and Liability Act (now Superfund).
Dr. Lehr admits in his proposal, “Replacing the Environmental
Protection Agency,” that “these acts worked well in protecting the environment
and the health of our citizens, with the exception of Superfund, which proved
to be too overreaching and wreaked havoc with U.S. business as company
operating within the law were fined countless dollars and required to pay huge
sums after the fact for clean-up of waste disposal that had been within the law
at the time of the activity.” (pp. 1-2)
Viewing his plan as penance, Dr. Lehr found it appropriate
and fitting that the person who helped form the EPA (December 2, 1970) should
contribute to its dismissal via a plan that took him two years to develop. Dr.
Lehr was happy to announce that Governor Scot Walker of Wisconsin, presidential
candidate, has adopted this entire EPA replacement plan.
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| EPA regions of the U.S. |
Referring to England, Lehr quoted Samuel Adams, who wrote on
Jan. 20, 1772 in the Boston Gazette, “If the public are bound to yield to
obedience to the laws to which they cannot give their approval, they are slaves
to those who make such laws and enforce them.”
Unfortunately today, it is not just the EPA, but many other
agencies whose unelected officials produce endless regulations, Lehr added. We
have an “over-criminalization in this country” because of endless regulations people
have no idea exist, rules that Americans “probably break at least once a week.”
He continued, “There are now in the federal regulatory handbook, 200 volumes of
80,000 laws, and 300,000 regulations written by various agencies with the EPA
number one offender.”
James Madison warned us in the Federalist papers that …
“laws should be made by men of their own choosing. If the laws are so
voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be
understood,” then we have a serious problem.
Dr. Lehr believes that we are subjected today to so many
laws that few people can track. “Big Business, Big Government, and Big Special
Interests collude to make such laws” that give them advantage over the
competition. “We have a warped economy,” Lehr said, “where the rich get richer,
with the rest having less opportunity because the big three are gaming the
system to gain political influence… They get privilege.”
Enabling the big three who handicap competitors and take
full advantage of public subsidies, “EPA is all but a wholly owned subsidiary
of liberal activist groups." Its rules account for about half of the nearly
$2 trillion a year cost of complying with all national regulations in the U.S.”
(Wayne W. Crews, Ten Thousand
Commandments, Washington, D.C.:
Competitive Enterprise Institute, 2014)
Calling it a “rogue agency,” Dr. Lehr proposed to replace,
not fix the EPA, by systematically dismantling it and replacing it with a
Committee of the Whole of the 50 state environmental protection agencies.
National EPA could be phased out over five years, said Dr. Lehr. “The Committee
of the Whole would determine which regulations are actually mandated in law by
Congress and which were established by EPA without congressional approval.” (Replacing the Environmental Protection
Agency, Jay Lehr, Ph.D., The Heartland Institute, p. 7)
He proposes that “the EPA research laboratories should be
left in place at the national level to answer scientific questions, and even
these laboratories must be substantially reorganized.” (Ibid, p. 6)
Specifically, 10 regional offices would be established,
cutting back the budget from $8.2 billion to $2 billion a year, and reducing
staff from over 15,000 to 300 in the national EPA headquarters in Topeka,
Kansas. Of the 300 employees working, there will be six delegate-employees from
each of the 50 states.
When asked how he would deal with the potential growth of
the new EPA, Dr. Lehr admitted that this detail has not been worked out yet.
The chairman of the Committee of the Whole would be elected by the 300
delegate-employees to a three-year term.
The drawdown would be:
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Year One – all employees would be told of the
five-year transition period to allow them time for alternate employment; all
300 new employees would transfer, start working, and decide assignments to
various subcommittees
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Year Two – Offices of Policy, Administration and
Resource Management, Enforcement and Compliance Assurance will be relocated
from Washington and from regional offices to Topeka
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Year Three – Offices of Air and Radiation and
Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention would transfer to Topeka
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Year Four – Offices of Solid Waste and Emergency
Response, and Offices of Water would be moved to Topeka
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Year Five – Offices of Chief Financial Officer,
General Counsel, Environmental Information, and the Office of the Administrator
would also move to Topeka.
Transition members would be assigned periodically to
Washington, D.C. and to regional offices to study the activities of the
existing branches. If attrition is high early on, transfer of responsibility
may be earlier than planned. Each state would be allocated $20 million to
augment the new responsibilities.
Dr. Lehr, as one of the founders of the EPA, believes
strongly that his plan can be implemented “efficiently and quickly.”
