The EPA: bureaucrats who govern by deceit?

It sure sounds like it to me! Via Warren Meyer's Coyote Blog, we learn that the Environmental Protection Agency appears to be helping environmentalists to sue it, in order to implement policies that would not be approved by legislators.

... several environmental groups that have received millions in EPA grants regularly file suit against that same agency. A dozen green groups were responsible for more than 3,000 suits against the EPA and other government agencies over the past decade, according to a study by the Wyoming-based Budd-Falen Law Offices.

The EPA even tacitly encourages such suits, going so far as to pay for and promote a "Citizen's Guide" that, among other things, explains how to sue the agency under "citizen suit" provisions in environmental laws. The guide's author — the Environmental Law Institute — has received $9.9 million in EPA grants over the past decade.

And, to top it off, critics say the EPA often ends up paying the groups' legal fees under the Equal Access to Justice Act.

. . .

"The EPA isn't harmed by these suits," said Jeffrey Holmstead, who was an EPA official during the Bush administration. "Often the suits involve things the EPA wants to do anyway. By inviting a lawsuit and then signing a consent decree, the agency gets legal cover from political heat."

Holmstead called this kind of litigation "sweetheart suits."

There's more at the link.

Taking this together with the EPA's unconscionable penalizing (barefaced robbery by any other name) of refineries for not using a product that doesn't actually exist, I'm getting the impression that this agency needs to be savagely reined in - if not abolished altogether. If these reports are correct, it's clearly out of control, and acting solely in its own interests rather than those of the country or the people. It's long gone time that stopped.

Peter