The Environmental Protection Agency, which boasts 18,000 full-time employees, a $10 billion budget, and has the power to impose economy-crippling regulations on the American way of life, has admitted a dangerous truth: to them, jobs just don’t matter.
In a hearing Thursday before the House Environment and Economy Subcommittee, U.S. Rep. Cory Gardner (R-Co) questioned EPA Assistant Administrator Mathy Stanislaus on the Agency’s economic analyses related to legislation. Specifically, Rep. Gardner asked whether the EPA considers the effect its regulations have on jobs. His answer: nope, it does not directly examine regulations’ impacts on jobs. You can see the full exchange in the video above. As the Committee writes, the EPA’s failure to account for jobs is contrary to President Barack Obama’s own Executive Order:
Executive Order 13563 of January 18, 2011 – Improving Regulation and Regulatory Review
Section 1. General Principles of Regulation. (a) Our regulatory system must protect public health, welfare, safety, and our environment while promoting economic growth, innovation, competitiveness, and job creation.
The EPA’s admission is disconcerting, but no more so than the regulatory path it would like to head down. Heritage’s Nicolas Loris writes:
[U]nelected bureaucrats at the EPA are attempting to bypass the legislative process through regulatory dictate by using The Clean Air Act to regulate carbon dioxide. The problem is that Congress never intended The Clean Air Act to cover CO2 and the result of doing so would extract trillions of dollars from our economy and destroy over one million jobs. Worse yet, there would be no demonstrable benefit to the environment.
