Report: Environmental Protection Agency Is Well-Armed and Anti-Business

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Heartland:

A newly released audit of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by the Illinois-based watchdog organization Open the Books discovered hundreds of millions of dollars of questionable expenses, including high-end luxury furnishings, sports equipment, ongoing paramilitary purchases totaling $715 million for arming and training “Special Agents,” and on data mining and equipment enabling the agency to snoop on industry and prepare deadly force raids to enforce EPA regulations.

 

Openthebooks.com publishes a report every quarter on the spending of a different government agency. This 44-page snapshot captures the size, scale, and scope of EPA with information from a careful examination of tens of thousands of checks written by the agency totaling more than $93 billion from 2000 to 2014.

 

‘A Massive Federal Agency’

 

“The first thing you see in our report is that the EPA is a massive federal agency,” said Adam Andrzejewski, founder of Openthebooks.com.

 

EPA’s fiscal year 2015 budget totaled $8.13 billion. If EPA became its own state, its budget would rank 42nd among all state budgets, Andrzejewski says. EPA employs more than 1,000 attorneys, which means if EPA were a law firm, it would rank as the 14th largest domestic law firm in the United States, even though EPA lawyers don’t defend the agency in court, Andrzejewski notes. The Department of Justice has this responsibility, and between 1998 and 2010, it spent $43 million in additional legal fees defending EPA.

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House Hearing Witness: On the Clean Power Plan, ‘EPA’s Cost Estimate Is an Underestimate’

 

Some witnesses questioned the president’s climate initiative, the Clean Power Plan, during a House Committee on Science, Space and Technology hearing on Wednesday.

Anne Smith, the senior vice president and environmental practice co-chair at NERA Economic Consulting, cautioned that on the CPP, the “EPA’s cost estimate is an underestimate.”

Smith said the CPP’s “net costs to the economy are substantial,” with higher electricity costs and reduced consumer spending.

 

Paul Knappenberger, the assistant director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute, said “climate change is real” and that it is due to “human and natural factors.” What is disputed is “the degree to which we can separate those factors.”

http://dailysignal.com/2015/11/19/house-hearing-witness-on-the-clean-power-plan-epas-cost-estimate-is-an-underestimate/

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EPA wraps up Clean Power Plan road show

 

It may have been a coincidence, but one of the public hearings organized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on the controversial Clean Power Plan fell on World COPD Day.

 

While proponents of the Clean Power Plan emphasize the health and breathing benefits they say will come from the new regulation, critics insist it will choke business and raise rates.

 

The arguments and counter-arguments come as the EPA wraps up a series of meetings in four cities across the country, giving the public the chance to speak out about the plan considered to be the most sweeping regulation in agency history.

 

For environmentalists, the plan represents a dramatic step forward, but business interests say the CPP will be a job-killer.

 

“For everyone, but especially for people with chronic lung disease, climate change is a major public health threat,” said Paul Billings, senior vice president for the American Lung Association, during Wednesday’s hearing in Washington, D.C. “Communities across the country are already experiencing its impact, including more dangerous ozone and particle pollution in the air they breathe.”

 

http://watchdog.org/248027/epa-clean-power-plan-2/