Help wanted at EPA

Ben Howe:

You may have read my recent post reporting that the EPA will be responsible for over 1.4 million job losses over the next 7 years.  In that environment, I suppose bureaucratic hires is the closest one can get to good jobs news when it comes to that big government dream agency known as the Environmental Protection Agency.

DailyCaller: The EPA is asking taxpayers to fund up to 230,000 new government workers to process all the extra paperwork, at an estimated cost of $21 billion. That cost does not include the economic impact of the regulations themselves.

“Hiring the 230,000 full-time employees necessary to produce the 1.4 billion work hours required to address the actual increase in permitting functions would result in an increase in Title V administration costs of $21 billion per year,” the EPA wrote in the court brief.

So while the Maximum Achievable Control Technology (MACT) as well as  Cross-State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR) rules are going to wreak havoc on places like Texas, destroy the coal industry, and ultimately force power bills to increase almost as quickly as energy sector jobs are shed, the United States government will be embarking on its own jobs initiative: 230,000 freshly minted pencil-pushing bureaucrats!

As stated above, these new jobs would serve the purpose of enforcing all of the new regulations under the Clean Air Act  which was created by the EPA in 2009.  So why are courts involved?  Because the EPA is deliberately violating the very Clean Air Act they are intending to enforce.

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In summary, they can’t keep up with regulating something that they volunteered to regulate, so rather than reconsidering the law, they are just breaking it.  And while they’re breaking it, they are requesting that taxpayers (you know, the people who don’t have the option to simply break laws that are overly burdensome) have to fork over $21 billion so the EPA can hire enough bureaucrats to handle the absolutely ridiculous hours it would take to regulate all of the carbon dioxide in America.

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 This is what control freak government looks like.  Even the EPA must think this situation is a little crazy.  Imagine all the nonproductive work they are going to create for energy producers who must make the reports.  All that will be added directly to you electric bill while the EPA hires will be added to the deficit.