Well, I work for EPA, definitely underfunded and I like to think, important. I am convinced they are trying to destroy us. However, you won't hear a peep in the water cooler about it. The silence on political afairs here in deafening. Sergio
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I would guess the top officials are not interested in destroying their agencies per se, but rather are locked in a marketing dilemma. The problem is how to keep selling off government and public commons over and over.
Take the EPA as an example. You can divert its funding to sub contractors to monitor industry if you can convince industry its worth the effort to bid on those contracts. But that assumes there is a regulatory scheme that needs corrupting. Once those environmental regulations are gutted of any enforcement provisions or any monitoring implementations, then there are nothing to sell to industry.
That leaves what? Statistics and reports. These could be sold off, but they are probably too labor intensive to be profitable on their own, even for shill consultant firms run by industry. Besides, except for strip minning, deforestation, and fresh water pollution, I am not sure we have any industry left.
See that's the bitch about Neoliberalism. Except for a few crude arrangements to sell off government and the public commons there is no there, there.
Its that age old problem of neoliberal economics. If you don't keep producing government, you can't keep selling it.
Chuck Grimes