Why the EPA nominee wants to be a political wrecking ball

The Christian Science Monitor discusses the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulations with William Yeatman. 

Since state offices already are increasingly shouldering the burden of environmental enforcement and planning, they’re better positioned to regulate, argues William Yeatman, a senior fellow at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute.

A slew of new or stricter regulations and the requisite planning, combined with an EPA that misses regulatory deadlines, has complicated state agencies’ roles, Yeatman said. The amount of times the Obama administration imposed a federal plan on states for reducing air pollution demonstrates the problem, in his view. That so-called federal implementation plan is used when states submit a plan that doesn’t sufficiently meet an air quality standard – and the Obama EPA used that tool 56 times compared with the previous three presidents using it a combined 5 times.

“The Clean Air Act stipulates that the states are supposed to be first among equals,” Yeatman said. “Demonstrably, that’s the way it has not worked over the last eight years. What we’ve seen is this shift from cooperative federalism to coercive federalism.”

Read the full article at The Christian Science Monitor.