Over the last decade, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been the poster child for government waste, employee misconduct, and job-killing policies. This pitiful legacy offers new EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt a golden opportunity to turn around the troubled agency.
On June 1, 2017 President Donald Trump withdrew from the Paris Climate Treaty, often called the Paris Agreement or Accord. Based on the caterwauling and wringing of hands by environmentalists, the media, state and local officials, and foreign leaders, you would have thought that floods would be ensuing within days due to the polar ice caps melting overnight and the end of the world was nigh.
Yesterday, President Donald Trump withdrew from the Paris Climate Treaty or, as it is often called, the Paris Accord. He righted what has been a bone of contention since the agreement’s birth at the Paris climate change meeting in November 2015. Many senators and policy analysts have rightfully argued the climate agreement was a treaty and should have been submitted to the Senate for advice and consent, as the Constitution requires. But, President Obama did not want to submit it to the Senate because he knew it would not be ratified. Instead, he continued his executive overreach and implemented the policy illegally with his “pen and his phone.” Chris Horner and Marlo Lewis of the Competitive Enterprise Institute discuss in their May 2017 report the serious legal and economic consequences to the U.S. if President Obama’s actions were not reversed.
On Wednesday, April 5, 2017 the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Federal Lands held a hearing to consider the construction of a road linking the town of King Cove to Cold Bay, and the latter’s all-weather airport. At issue is H.R. 218, introduced by Federal Lands Subcommittee member Don Young (R-Alaska) in January 2017, which […]
As President Barack Obama’s term comes to an end, many federal agencies and departments are attempting to beat the clock by jamming a flurry of new regulations onto the books before January 20, 2017.
For more than a year, Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) has been investigating the National Park Service’s (NPS) ban on the sale of bottled water, believing it was an obtrusive inconvenience to visitors and a waste of taxpayer dollars. To date, 23 parks have decided to follow NPS Director Jonathan Jarvis’s December 14, 2011 NPS Policy Memorandum 11-03. This policy allows parks, on a case-by-case basis, and after an extensive review and approval by their respective regional directors, to ban the sale of water contained in disposable plastic bottles. The stated purpose of the ban was to reduce plastic in the parks’ waste stream and to decrease the carbon footprint as part of the NPS’s “Go Green” initiative.
On November 14, President Obama made the following remarks in a press conference before his final foreign trip. When asked about legal constraints placed on him by Congress (specifically with respect to prisoners housed at Guantanamo Bay and his belief that the limitations were unconstitutional), he said, “One of the things you discover about being […]
No department or agency in the federal government is immune from the bureaucratic toxin of waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement. Ironically, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which is responsible for cleaning up all kinds of sewage, sludge, and foul matter, has consistently been one of the most wasteful agencies. EPA officials have so consistently mismanaged and squandered the taxpayers’ money in 2016 that this year alone should serve as a teachable moment for other federal agencies.
On May 31, 2016, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) issued its ruling in U.S. Army Corps of Engineers v. Hawkes Co. The case raised the question whether property owners could challenge “jurisdictional determinations” by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). USACE considered Hawkes’ land to be “navigable waters,” based on the […]
In the land of the free, the federal government still controls more than 50 percent of all land west of Kansas. The ongoing control of such a large part of the western states by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) has been disastrous to the environment and the economy. With record-setting wildfires burning millions of acres, emitting pollutants into the air, and destroying habitats and watersheds, the only solution is to transfer the public lands to willing states, which will provide for more accountable and efficient land management.
