Ruckelshaus, who is now in his mid‐​80s, has been away from the EPA for 32 years and the rosy picture he paints of expert, efficient bureaucracy is very different from the reality of recent decades. I know first‐​hand that it was different even during his second, short stint there from 1983 to 1985.

Blocking innovation / When I joined the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1979, I was essentially apolitical and knew next to nothing about federal regulation. A science nerd, I had spent the previous 16 years in college, graduate school, medical school, and post‐​doctoral training. It didn’t take long until I learned about the jungle of government bureaucracies. And one of the darkest and most dangerous parts of that jungle was the perfidious and incompetent EPA, one of the FDA’s siblings.

I found the EPA, several of whose major programs I interacted with, to be relentlessly anti‐​science, anti‐​technology, and anti‐​industry. The only thing it seemed to be for was the Europeans’ innovation‐​busting “precautionary principle,” the view that until a product or activity has been proven safe definitively, it should be banned or at least smothered with regulation. (See “The Paralyzing Principle,” Winter 2002–2003.) In fact, during international discussions and negotiations over the harmonization of biotechnology regulations in which I participated, the EPA often seemed allied with the European Union and committed to working against U.S. interests. At home, its officials seemed to be taking their marching orders from the most radical elements of the environmental movement.

The EPA has unilaterally killed off entire, once‐​promising sectors of U.S. research and development. The use of genetically engineered microorganisms for bioremediation—that is, the biological cleanup of toxic wastes, including oil—is one.

Accidents that result in oil spills are inevitable as long as they can be caused by human or mechanical failures or the vagaries of weather. During the 1980s, microorganisms genetically engineered to degrade spilled oil were developed in laboratories. But draconian EPA regulations discouraged their testing and commercialization, ensuring that the techniques available for responding to these disasters remain low‐​tech and marginally effective. Those measures include such archaic methods as deploying booms to contain the oil, burning or spraying chemicals to disperse it, and spreading absorbent mats.

At the time of the catastrophic 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, there were great expectations for modern biotechnology applied to bioremediation. William Reilly, then head of the EPA, later recalled, “When I saw the full scale of the disaster in Prince William Sound in Alaska … my first thought was: Where are the exotic new technologies, the products of genetic engineering, that can help us clean this up?”

He of all people should have known. Innovation had been stymied by Reilly’s own agency’s hostile policies toward the most precise new genetic engineering techniques.

Another biotech sector that the EPA relegated to oblivion was protection of crops from frost damage. Peaches, plums, citrus, and other crops are regularly threatened by frost in the Southeast, resulting in losses that can total in the billions of dollars. California is also susceptible: A January 2007 freeze there cost farmers more than $1 billion in losses of citrus, avocados, and strawberries, and a 1990 freeze caused about $800 million in damage to agriculture, resulting in the layoff of 12,000 citrus‐​industry workers, including pickers, packers, harvesters, and salespeople.

Farmers fight freeze damage with pathetically low‐​tech methods. These include burning smudge pots, which produce warm smoke; running wind machines to move the frigid air; and spraying water on the plants to form an insulating coat of ice.

In the early 1980s, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley and in industry devised a more ingenious approach. They knew that a harmless bacterium, Pseudomonas syringae, which normally lives on many plants, contains an “ice‐​nucleation” protein that promotes frost damage. They produced a variant of the bacterium that lacked the ice‐​nucleation protein, reasoning that spraying this variant bacterium (dubbed “ice‐​minus”) on plants might prevent frost damage by displacing the common, damage‐​promoting kind. Using precise genetic engineering techniques, the researchers deleted the gene for the ice‐​nucleation protein and planned field tests with ice‐​minus bacteria.

Then the EPA stepped in and that was the beginning of the end. Regulators classified as a pesticide the innocuous ice‐​minus bacterium, which was to be tested in Northern California on small, fenced‐​off plots of potatoes and strawberries. How could it be a pesticide? Because the regulators considered the naturally occurring, ubiquitous “ice‐​plus” bacterium a pest because its ice‐​nucleation protein promotes ice crystal formation that damages plants. Therefore, they reasoned, other bacteria intended to displace it would be a pesticide. This is the kind of absurd, sophistic reasoning that could lead the EPA to regulate trash‐​can lids as pesticides because they deter or mitigate a pest, namely raccoons.

At the time, scientists inside and outside the EPA were unanimous that the test posed negligible risk. (I wrote the FDA’s opinion.) No new genetic material had been added; only a single gene, whose function was well‐​known, had been removed, and the organism was obviously harmless. Nonetheless, the field trial was subjected to an extraordinary long and burdensome review only because the organism was created with modern genetic engineering techniques.

It is noteworthy that experiments using bacteria with identical traits but constructed with older, cruder techniques require no governmental review of any kind. When tested on less than 10 acres, nongenetically engineered bacteria and chemical pesticides are exempt from regulation. Moreover, there is no government regulation of the use of vast quantities of the ice‐​plus organisms, which are commonly blown into the air during snow‐​making at ski resorts.

Policy by policy and decision by decision, the EPA has damaged the nation’s competitiveness, ability to innovate, and capacity to create wealth.

Although the ice‐​minus bacteria proved safe and effective at preventing frost damage in field trials, further research was discouraged by the combination of onerous government regulation, the inflated expense of doing the experiments, and the prospect of huge downstream costs of pesticide registration. As a result, the product was never commercialized and plants cultivated for food and fiber throughout much of the nation remain vulnerable to frost damage. We have the EPA to thank for putting farmers’ livelihoods in jeopardy, jobs lost, and inflated produce prices for consumers.

Flawed decisions / During the two decades since I left government service, I’ve continued to watch the EPA’s missteps and excesses with a mixture of awe and vexation. Policy by policy and decision by decision, the EPA has damaged the nation’s competitiveness, ability to innovate, and capacity to create wealth.

The EPA’s ever‐​expanding regulation imposes huge costs on American businesses and ultimately on consumers. An analysis by the Competitive Enterprise Institute estimates that the annual cost of compliance with EPA regulations is more than a third of a trillion dollars.

The EPA is the prototype of agencies that spend more and more to address smaller and smaller risks. In one analysis by the Office of Management and Budget of the 30 least cost‐​effective regulations throughout the government, the EPA had imposed no fewer than 17.

One of the EPA’s most controversial recent actions was to redefine “navigable waters” for the purpose of regulating them under the Clean Water Act. Under the new definition these include virtually every body of water in the nation right down to the smallest of streams, farm ponds, and ditches. (Pursuant to an order from President Trump, this travesty is now being reversed.)

Another example of flawed EPA decisionmaking was the imposition of overly stringent ambient air standards under the Clean Air Act. Clean air is desirable, of course, but an EPA rule finalized in February 2012 that created new emissions standards for coal‐ and oil‐​fired electric utilities was ill‐​conceived. According to an analysis (“Government Regulators Were Too Busy in 2012,” Dec. 28, 2012) by Diane Katz and James Gattuso of the Heritage Foundation:

The benefits are highly questionable, with the vast majority being unrelated to the emissions targeted by the regulation. The costs, however, are certain: an estimated $9.6 billion annually. The regulations will produce a significant loss of electricity generating capacity, which [will] undermine energy reliability and raise energy costs across the entire economy.

Transgressions / Regulatory excesses are one thing; dishonesty and mendacity are something else. An EPA subterfuge that has received attention from the U.S. Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee is the “sue‐​and‐​settle” maneuver the EPA uses frequently to advance its agenda in a way that substitutes a judicial mechanism for the customary, prescribed interface between legislation and agency rulemaking.

The way this works is that environmental groups (some of which receive government grants) sue the federal government on the grounds that agencies are failing to meet their regulatory obligations, and then—behind closed doors—the activists and regulators concoct a settlement agreement that furthers activists’ (and regulators’) extra‐​statutory goals. Thus, sue‐​and‐​settle is a strategy that circumvents both congressional intent and the rulemaking process.

Last year, investigators found two flagrant transgressions of federal law by the EPA: engaging in “covert propaganda” and “grassroots lobbying.” The Government Accountability Office discovered that the EPA illegally used Thunderclap, a social media site, “to correct what [the EPA] viewed as misinformation.” Government use of social media is not unlawful per se and many agencies use it to communicate their actions and policies to the public. But the EPA crossed the line when it asked members of the public to share EPA‐​composed propaganda on Facebook or Twitter without attributing it to the government. Neglecting to reveal the source was the basis of the “covert propaganda” violation because the law says that citizens must know when messages presented to them were created by their government.

Federal agencies are supposed to be apolitical and federal law prohibits lobbying for or against proposed legislation. But an EPA blog post contained links to websites that encouraged the public to, for example, “urge your senators to defend Clean Water Act safeguards for critical streams and wetlands.” This “grassroots lobbying” was a violation of federal law because, at the time, Congress was considering a number of pieces of legislation to derail the EPA’s “waters of the United States” regulation. Not surprisingly, the EPA wanted those bills to be defeated.

The above examples are by no means an exhaustive list. For at least the past three decades, the EPA has been a rogue agency—ideological, poorly managed, dishonest, and out of touch with sound science and common sense. It is emblematic of what Wall Street Journal columnist Bill McGurn has condemned as the “soft despotism” of the “unelected and increasingly assertive class that populates our federal bureaucracies and substitutes rule by regulation for the rule of law.”

The new head of the EPA, Scott Pruitt, made clear in a recent interview that things are about to change. According to Pruitt:

This past administration didn’t bother with statutes…. They displaced Congress, disregarded the law, and in general said they would act in their own way. That now ends.

About time.