A New Day at the EPA

The way environmental policy in the United States is supposed to work is that we’ve set up these agencies with statutory mandates to protect the environment and staffed them with experts and so forth to do analysis of what kinds of things constitute environmental hazards that are sufficiently grave as to merit the costs of action. It’s supposed to be that those experts do their work and policy results accordingly. Of course in practice if George W. Bush is in office, policy results not according to what EPA staffers say is good for public health but according to what lobbyists say their bosses want. Juliet Eilperin reports for The Washington Post on a new day at the EPA:

By Feb. 20, the efforts of Reifsnyder and dozens of other rank-and-file federal employees had borne fruit: After the United States voiced support for the idea of a new, binding mercury treaty, the world community embraced it in Nairobi.

The rapid policy reversal is just one of more than a dozen environmental initiatives the new administration has undertaken in its first two months. In nearly every case, the decisions were based on extensive analysis and documentation that rank-and-file employees had prepared over the past couple of years, often in the face of contrary-minded Bush administration officials.

After years of chafing under political appointees who viewed stricter environmental regulation with skepticism, long-serving federal officials are seeing work that had been gathering dust for years translate quickly into action.

This relates to one of my favorite themes—how harmful it is for the United States to have such an overgrown number of political appointees at our civilian agencies. In other countries, a given ministry will typically have one or two political appointees but the vast majority of the responsibility is in the hands of career civil servants. The role of the political appointees is to give overall direction to the agency and, in their role as a cabinet, perhaps help set overall policy for the administration. But running the government is seen as a job for professionals. If politicians want to change an agency’s mandate, they can write legislation doing so, but not just subvert it by fiat. It works in other systems around the world, and it works in the United States military where the president has some discretion about which generals and admirals fill which high-level roles, but doesn’t just bring a giant crew of people in from the outside.