When Did EPA Turn Into a Four-Letter Word?

On the EPA's 40th birthday, many Republicans could use a history lesson and remember that the agency was a GOP idea.

E-P-A has become a four-letter word to many Republicans. As a featured attraction at GOP piñata parties, the Environmental Protection Agency is in the top ranks, along with debt, taxes, and Obamacare.

It won’t be long before a Tea Party Republican dusts off Dancing Tom DeLay’s old reference to EPA as a Gestapo agency.

On the occasion of EPA’s ruby anniversary on December 2, it’s time for those Republicans to sit down for an overdue history lesson.

EPA was a Republican idea. EPA was initiated, supported, and led ably by Republicans. Republicans ought to be proud of what they created and what it has accomplished.

Thanks to Republicans, rivers don’t catch fire anymore. Airborne lead is no longer shaving down our kids’ IQ points. New cars are 200 times cleaner than 1960s models. Northeastern lakes are no longer turning into vinaigrette dressing.

Richard Nixon established EPA as an independent agency because he agreed with advisers from the political and business worlds that it would be more efficient to set and enforce environmental standards under one roof. At the time, air, water, and waste programs were stovepiped hither and yon across the federal establishment’s bureaucratic principalities.

A few weeks after William Ruckelshaus opened EPA’s front door for the first time as its new administrator, President Nixon gave EPA a heaping load of work by signing into law the Clean Air Act.

The Clean Air Act passed with thumping bipartisan majorities, 73-0 in the Senate, 375-1 in the House. Republicans like Howard Baker helped make the Clean Air Act happen. Republicans like Strom Thurmond voted for it. Ruckelshaus and his successors at EPA, Republican and Democrat, made powerful use of the Clean Air Act’s tools to protect public health.

Sure, in EPA’s early days, pollution was much more in our faces. There wasn’t much political advantage for congressmen to pretend that breathing brown air and drinking out of black rivers was good for us.

Today, the cleanup job is much harder. The leading pollution sources are not the big, chunky smokestacks and outfall pipes of yesteryear but millions of small sources that are less obvious.

At the same time, we face environmental pressures that are larger and deeper in scope than those of 40 years ago – a changing climate, ocean acidification, the overloaded nitrogen cycle – e.g. the Gulf of Mexico dead zone – and freshwater depletion.

We’ll need to hear a range of ideas for confronting such systemic problems, including Republican ideas, knowing, as Ronald Reagan said, that “preservation of our environment is not a partisan challenge; it’s common sense.”

EPA will have an important role to play in lightening human pressure on our natural capital over the next 40 years. What EPA will need from Republicans are not gratuitous attacks, but the best ideas that the rich conservative tradition of stewardship can generate.