Enforcement Dynamics in Federal Air Pollution Policy

During his tenure as President, George W. Bush has pushed a domestic policy agenda that strongly advocates reducing the burdens on business, allegedly caused by regulations that have been deemed too punitive and too expensive by the Administration and its allies. This policy shift has taken place within most agencies responsible for administering social and economic regulation, but environmental regulation has been the most salient and visible example of the Administration’s attempt to roll back enforcement activities. In particular, administration officials have spent much time trying to rewrite the New Source Review rules under the Clean Air Act, specifically to ensure that power plants and other energy concerns would not have to spend potentially billions on anti-pollution control when they upgrade their facilities. With strong efforts like these, to make regulation more business-friendly, it is natural to expect that enforcement activities in the EPA would decline during the Bush Administration. However, this conclusion may be premature, given previous research on this subject. Our primary interest in this paper is to determine whether the Bush Administration has been successful, through the use of subtle means of presidential power, in rolling bac