The Necropolitan Sentinel

Hell, it’s not like it’s their money, right?

Perhaps the most egregious example of everything wrong with our federal bureaucracies resides with the Environmental Protection Agency. John Merline, writing in Investor’s Business Daily, tells a tale of EPA abuse of power and squandering of taxpayer monies that ought to cause the American public to demonstrate in righteous rage. I have never seen a more compelling argument for the immediate abolishment of a federal agency.

The EPA is using taxpayer money to encourage environmentalist groups to sue … the EPA. This has continued for decades.

The EPA has paid one of these groups to produce a do-it-yourself guide to suing the EPA.

The EPA frequently enters into consent decrees to settle the suits. Even when the EPA doesn’t hand out megadollar settlements — your money — to the litigious loons, it commonly pays their attorney’s fees.

Why would the EPA do something so obviously crazy?

High-level EPA bureaucrats commonly support the leftist environmentalist beliefs of these groups, as do a great many of the career employees of the agency. They look to serve the leftist groups, not their employers.

Generally speaking, Congress has not authorized the EPA to do most of the things such people live to do, things such as regulating and litigating energy producers, small businesses, and large corporations out of existence. But EPA bureaucrats tend not to like such small-minded, non-nuanced strictures, so they encourage their fellow travelers in the environmentalist movement to sue the EPA. The hope is that the courts can force the EPA to do what the EPA wanted to do in the first place. Rather than erecting a vigorous defense to frivolous environmentalist lawsuits, the EPA simply caves.

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