The Regulators are Coming

“The British are coming! The British are coming!” This is the phrase attributed to Paul Revere during his midnight ride at the start of the American Revolutionary War; but according to eye witness accounts in historical documents, he actually said, “The Regulars are coming out.”[1] The “Regulars” was a term referring to an official army of a country, and in this case, it referred to Great Britain’s army.[2]

The Revolutionary War in essence was an economic war. The colonists had had enough of Great Britain and King George’s trade and tax policies. They were making it nearly impossible for most American entrepreneurs to profitably run a business and support their families. The last straw was the Stamp Act of 1765 and soon the Boston Tea Party and the war followed.[3]

Paul Revere’s warning was uttered to the American colonists well over 200 years ago. In a sense, though, it could be pronounced again today, not in regards to Great Britain’s regular army, but in response to the Environmental Protection Agency’s army of regulations. However, his cry today would probably be… “The Regulators are coming! The Regulators are coming!”

Today the regulations of the EPA are having the same destructive economic effects as King George and his taxation laws. According to a February 2012 study just released by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, never in the EPA’s 40-year history have so many environmental rules been put into effect simultaneously that have converging effective dates and massive compliance costs. These costs are estimated to be in the billions and some say even 1 trillion dollars![4]

Some of the EPA rules currently adopted or in various stages of proposal are:[5]

* Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR)

* Electric Utility Maximum Available Control Technology Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants (Utility MACT)

* Industrial Boiler MACT

* Portland Cement Kiln MACT

* Cooling Water Intake Structure Rule (CWIS)

* Coal Combustion Residuals Rule (CCR)

* Ozone National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS)

* Particulate Matter (PM) NAAQS

* Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Regulation of Stationary Sources

* GHG Regulation of Mobile Sources

Suffice it to say if you string a few letters from the alphabet together you’ve more than likely come up with an EPA regulation!

Not only are these rules costly to enact but taken altogether they would destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs in the process (a sobering thought to many in this already depressed economy).[6] An even more astounding aspect to all of this is the EPA, by their own admission, doesn’t even figure job losses into their economic analysis, a point that one Congressman incredulously observed and repeatedly pointed out to the EPA representative being questioned on Capital Hill![7] How can this be? An economic analysis on the consequences of EPA regulations without looking at the crucial impact on jobs! Why even bother.

Researching even further into EPA’s protocol for analysis and studies, it turns out the very method of their scientific procedures has been questioned by the U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO) and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) scientists.[8] The EPA has a program called IRIS (at least it’s not another regulation), which stands for Integrated Risk Information System. It is described on the EPA website as follows:

EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) is a human health assessment program that evaluates information on health effects that may result from exposure to environmental contaminants. Through the IRIS Program, EPA provides the highest quality science-based human health assessments to support the Agency’s regulatory activities.[9]

Notice the last sentence which states they provide “the highest quality science-based…” Yet on July 14, 2011 the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology Subcommittee on Investigations & Oversight held a hearing with the express purpose of evaluating the EPA’s IRIS program. In fact the GOA had this to say:

“The IRIS database was at serious risk of becoming obsolete because EPA had not been able to routinely complete timely, credible assessments. After subsequent reports, in January 2009 [GAO] added EPA‘s processes for assessing and controlling toxic chemicals to [its] list of areas at high risk for waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement or in need of broad-based transformation.”[10]

This July 2011 hearing was prompted in part by a report from the NAS, which had raised concerns in prior years over EPA’s IRIS process. According to the charter on the NAS website, they are asked to provide scientific advice to the Government whenever called upon and they receive no compensation for their services.[11]

Here is what Dr. Thomas Burke, associate dean of The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and recent chair of an NAS panel on ways to improve EPA risk assessment had to say:

“The sleeping giant is that EPA science is on the rocks . . . if you fail, you become irrelevant, and that is kind of a crisis.” He also referred to EPA‘s risk assessment process as the agency‘s “Achilles heel.”[12]

So here we have EPA bureaucrats (meaning we have no direct way to vote them out of office) enacting “through the roof” costly regulations for businesses; putting people out of work; AND all of this is based on flawed economic studies and questionable scientific procedures!

This must stop! We cannot in good conscience allow our citizens and our country to economically suffer under this type of bureaucratic agency. The EPA is not, as some would like to believe, the 4^th branch of the Federal Government. It is time for Congress to take back control from this agency, ending its over-reaching rules and regulations. And it is time for us to research and then vote in 2012 for candidates who understand and will enforce the Constitutional roles and responsibilities of the true branches of our government.

Now is the time for our “midnight ride” but be warned: the Regulators aren’t coming out. They are already here and they must be stopped!