The EPA was once charged with helping this country clean up the environment.   My tenure working within the Environmental Services Division of a Fortune 100 forest products company exposed me to the millions of dollars of capital improvements that were spent to meet EPA standards.   Our mills put water back into the river cleaner than the water they took out of the river.   I also saw the millions we spent eliminating the nitrates that once flew out our smokestacks and onto the parked cars in our mill towns.   I think they did their job. 

But, like many other organizations who are ultimately successful in accomplishing their goals, the EPA began to move the goal posts.   The administrators in the EPA had no real justification to maintain the staffs or the power they had to merely monitor success stories especially when new industry would benefit immediately from new technologies that were designed up front to reduce their waste.  They had to impose new burdens on businesses and they went beyond the bounds of why the agency was created.   If the air were no longer perceived as dirty, if businesses were no longer polluters, if the land was no longer at such extreme risk, it followed that to maintain their power the EPA would have to demand more and ultimately begin to demand the impossible.  

I believe the EPA should be eliminated and one of the reasons why is below including an excerpt and a link to the full story.  I am not saying that we do not require an agency to monitor industry and ensure they continue meeting their environmental responsibilities.  I just do not believe that this large and this powerful an agency is any longer required.  I believe they are doing more harm than good.     

Reining in the EPA’s regulatory overreach and unilateral decision making should be a priority for the 112th Congress. Congress should thoroughly evaluate and question the EPA’s newly implemented rules and have EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson justify her agency’s decision not just when it comes to hydraulic fracturing but other rules as well, most notably the regulation of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

http://blog.heritage.org/2011/01/20/epa-changing-the-rules-as-they-go/#more-50567