>could someone with a subscription to the journal please post this editorial.
The WSJ isn't on Nexis, is it? DJ used to have an exclusive on it.
Doug
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Wall Street Journal - March 8, 2002
Under the Influence
Senator Joe Lieberman began hearings yesterday on what he called the "troubling" Bush environmental policy. The hearings were prompted by the resignation of an Environmental Protection Agency director who accuses the Agency of cutting deals with industry to circumvent regulation.
There is a scandal at EPA, all right, but it's of a different sort. If Mr. Lieberman really wants to know who calls the shots in the back rooms, he'd do better asking about the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars the EPA doles out each year to non-profit organizations. This is money that the Inspector General and General Accounting Office have both said is given out with no public notice, no competition and virtually no accountability. The last time someone asked about this influence, it provoked a furious destruction of evidence that may yet lead to a contempt trial for several of the EPA's highest ranking officers.
For the dirty little secret of the Environmental Protection Agency is that it has morphed into a funding farm. From 1993 to 2001, tax-exempt non-profit organizations soaked the EPA for $2 billion, according to documents unearthed by the Landmark Legal Foundation.
Many millions went to causes with little to do with cleaner air or water. The EPA's top six non-profit recipients weren't even environmental organizations but senior-citizen groups, such as AARP, whose foundation got $99 million.
But far worse than pork is the funneling of money to groups involved in litigation or lobbying. Take the campaign to get General Electric to clean up PCBs dumped in the Hudson River from 1947 to 1977, which EPA Administrator Christine Whitman recently ordered done. Leave aside that GE's actions were perfectly legal at the time, or that there's no evidence that PCBs in the environment harm anyone except in massive quantities.
Landmark's documents show that the activists leading the charge against GE were almost all on the EPA dole. Friends of the Hudson, for one, advertises itself as a group of "concerned citizens and organizations." But 13 of the 19 groups that comprise its core membership have been funded by the EPA.
A May 2001 audit by EPA's own Inspector General noted the EPA "often" gives money to groups "based on the unsupported belief that those recipients were the only entities capable of performing the work." A General Accounting Office report confirms that EPA is no better on the follow-up, with problems including "spending funds for unallowable activities such as lobbying."
"This is an agency that requires others to account for parts per billion in chemicals yet which can't account for its own budget," says Landmark President Mark Levin. Landmark plans to put a database on its Web page (www.landmarklegal.org) of all documents it has received from its EPA litigation, so that Americans who find themselves the subject of an activist jihad can see if their own tax dollars are financing the campaign.
Landmark has stayed on this case, by the way, because its earlier request for names of the non-profits that EPA was funding provoked only stonewalling. That first request was filed in late 2000, after newspaper accounts quoted EPA officials who said they were working overtime to push through regulations in anticipation of a possible Bush victory.
In January 2001, federal Judge Royce Lamberth even ordered the EPA to protect the information Landmark was seeking. Instead, EPA officials had hard drives erased and back-up e-mail tapes destroyed. Judge Lamberth is now considering a motion to order the EPA, the U.S. Attorney's Office, former Administrator Carol Browner and her two top deputies to show why they shouldn't be held in contempt.
Now, there's a subject for Senate hearings.