Once an area of bipartisan cooperation, the U.S. environmental policy system has now become a partisan background in the current political climate. Although some progress has been made in few policy areas, the federal agencies have continually weakened and are often termed as fragmented. The main actors or rather agencies of responsibility for protecting Americans from both chemical and environmental threats include Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) (Kraft, 2017). Often the agencies are under attack from the Congress and have suffered a significant reduction in manpower hence inadequacy in the implementation of legal authorities. From a traditional environmental standpoint, the overall outlook is dismal. Environmental policy systems are in decline and regulatory agencies weakened. The environmental policy system does not only lack rationale but is fragmented and duplicative at the same time.
Basically, environmental comprehensive incentives particularly the regulatory has weakened as more emphasis being placed on the economic incentives. Both the congress and the federal government have increasingly employed approaches such as cap and trade to control the emission of Sulphur and its dioxides from power plants. These economic incentives have become more efficient and thus there is a likelihood that future compliance will be based on them. This has hindered policy making because of the financial benefits. However, it is worth noting that they cannot be feasible in the controlling of highly toxic materials. Instead regulations and policies are important for setting standards. Achieving such regulations has become difficult especially because of how easily the federal government can manipulate permits and prices of such approaches.
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The kind of approach the U.S. has on environmental regulation is duplicative and lacks a coherent rationale. The EPA which has most of its focus on water and air is dominant but other agencies are looked down upon. Yet they are all equally important. Laws that govern these agencies are fragmented because they require that each of them should focus on itself as if other agencies are non-existent. Furthermore the government has separate sets of laws for air, water, and land, each with a different bureaucracy (Kraft, 2017). The regulatory fracture is inconsistent with an interconnected physical environment. Naturally, pollutants are can be disposed in any environment due to how one medium is connected to the other. The current regulations ignore interconnects hence the separate agencies and a bunch of oversight committees that would have otherwise been integrated into one.
Opponents of the environmental policy system have further fragmented regulatory agencies by depriving them people and resources necessary to carry out their job. They have discovered this to be the most efficient way because for the agencies to function, resources and people to oversee the implementation of policies are necessary. Usually, the fragmentation is done superstitiously and away from cameras to avoid attention from the media. Currently the budgets of EPA, CPSC, and FDA are so small that they do not appear on the published budget of the Federal government (Remy Nash, Ruhl & Salzman, 2017). With deprivation of resources and people, effective policies cannot be made.
It is also worth noting that current policy systems are inadequate as there is no requirement for entities providing reliable information. Usually, environmental policy systems are dependent on information supplied by the regulated entity. There are three conditions that must be met for data to be incorporated into the policy systems. These include availability and accessibility of the data, the data must be understood, and it must be relevant and framed in a manner that it is incorporated in the making of effective policies to safeguard the environment. The federal government has done none of that. For instance. FDA should be given the mandate to oversee the toxicity of cosmetics. On the contrary, such scientific information has been contaminated by politics making it difficult to make effective environmental policies.
Implications of having a bunch of overseers committees, agencies and interference by the federal government is disorganization of the regulatory functions. For instance, a pollutant evaluated by multiple agencies. An efficient structure would be one in which the several environmental policies would be combined into a one and vigorous department which would then be used for the purposes of oversight, monitoring, and conducting research and assessment of the environment-related issues (Kraft, 2017). Besides the department would be effective in making policies that cross cut on one another as opposed to the current ones.
Further, political dynamics have created uneven policy outputs. Environmental policy goals embodied in the 60s and 70s were ambitious as they helped achieve lower levels of pollution of water, land, and air. With time, however, most of these policies became political-based. For instance the Clean Air Act passed in 1970 was dilute with amendments and neither of them matches the outputs of the preceding years (Rosenbaum, 2016). Generally environmental policies in absence of overarching strategies have competed with political interests in Congress hence hindering effective policymaking.
In conclusion, the U.S environmental policy system is fractured due to uneven policy outputs, disorganization of regulatory functions, and a duplicative approach that has an inadequate rationale. In the current political climate the choice for a viable environmental structure is either environmental regulation or none of it at all. Thus changes have to be made in the environmental policy system, failure to which the current fragmentation will still be seen in the future.
References
Kraft, M. E. (2017). Environmental policy and politics . Routledge.
Remy Nash, J., Ruhl, J. B., & Salzman, J. (2017). The Production Function of the Regulatory State: How Much Do Agency Budgets Matter?.
Rosenbaum, W. A. (2016). Environmental politics and policy . CQ press.
