Government Agency Responsible for Some Feature of Our Environment

EPA Profile Environmental Protection Agency

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is the main government agency tasked with monitoring the nation's environmental concerns. Because they are charged with protecting the United States environment, perhaps no government agency has a wider or more diverse mandate. The EPA handles a wide variety of environmental concerns, from potable water to clean air, from the nation's forests and wilderness to the country's wildlife population. In addition, the EPA also regulates the conduct of multinational industries, American businesses and even the personal actions of individual citizens (Williams).

As an agency, the EPA was created during the term of President Nixon. The publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and the growing popularity of the environmental movement pushed Nixon to create an agency to establish and enforce "environmental protection standards consistent with national environmental goals."

The first EPA administrator, William D. Ruckelhaus, was sworn in on December 4, 1970. During this time, the EPA's main task was to deal with the growing pollution problem brought about by decades of American industrialization ("The Guardian: Origins of the EPA").

Ruckelhaus's initial efforts to clean up America, however, were hampered by the centralized structure of the EPA. He soon realized that the daunting task of addressing the pollution problem was too broad for one organization. The administrator thus created five program offices, appointing commissioners to study problems relating to water quality, air quality, solid waste, pesticides and radiation ("The Guardian: Origins of the EPA").

Ruckelhaus's actions laid the foundations for the decentralized nature of the modern EPA.

Today, the EPA has moved beyond its initial mandate of pollution control. The growing recognition that environmental concerns such as pollution and global warming transcend national borders has further refined the role of the EPA. Often, the result is an agency that draws angry criticism from individual citizens, business groups, environmental activists and even its own government.

Under the leadership of Christine Todd Whitman, for example, the EPA drew much criticism from the Bush government when the agency supported tougher restrictions on the amount of arsenic to be allowed in drinking water. Whitman herself was unable to convince President Bush to send American representatives to United Nations talks regarding the Kyoto treaty on climate change (Barnes et al.). Environmental activists supported the EPA's efforts for the Kyoto Protocol, while business groups strongly criticized the agency and by extension, Whitman.

However, Whitman's EPA was also criticized by environmental activists when the agency shifted away from enforcing federal pollution laws in favor of giving states a bigger role in setting their own pollution standards. This time, the EPA was lauded by businesses, many of which faced laxer pollution control laws (Barnes et al.).