WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) has introduced proposed legislation to stop bureaucratic overreach by the U.S. Environment Protection Agency (EPA).
The End EPA Abuse Act was introduced into the 119th Congress in late June to stop the EPA from exercising undue authority to arbitrarily create and enforce policy decisions that rightly belong to Congress.
“The EPA has overstepped its authority as far as possible to put America’s energy producers in a chokehold,” according to Lee. “They’ve exploited any power they can grab to push Biden and Obama administration climate psychosis at the expense of our energy security. They make up and enforce regulations to suffocate America’s energy producers and devastate major sectors of our economy.”
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was established by the Republican administration of former President Richard M. Nixon in 1970. The original intent of the agency was to consolidate federal environmental responsibilities and effectively enforce regulations.
Lee’s staff in Washington say that the EPA has since increasingly interpreted federal laws, particularity the Clean Air Act, as a mandate to impact major sectors of the U.S. economy.
Originally enacted in 1963 and heavily amended in 1970, 1977 and 1990, the Clean Air Act is the foundational U.S. federal law that regulates air emissions from stationary and mobile sources to protect public health and the environment.
By exploiting statutory ambiguities and stretching its regulatory authority beyond Congress’s original intent, Republicans charge that the agency has abused the Clean Air Act to impose sweeping policies impacting electricity generation, transportation and industrial production.
For example, Senate aides say, the Obama-era EPA used Clean Air Act’s regulatory authority to attempt to implement the “Clean Power Plan,” which would have forced power plants to switch from coal to other sources of fuel.
In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected this overreach in West Virginia v. EPA, arguing that Congress had not authorized the EPA to assert such broad authority that would have carried massive economic and political consequences.
Lee argues that, despite positive court cases and deregulatory actions by President Donald Trump’s EPA, future administrations will likely continue using the Clean Air Act as a tool to assert authority for major policy decisions that go well beyond the law.
To avoid that, Congress should codify in statute clear guardrails to protect Americans from an EPA that imposes excessive rules that drive up prices, restrict consumer choice and devastate any industry of which the agency’s staff disapproves.
“The End EPA Abuse Act will clarify once and for all that policymaking belongs to Congress, whom the American people have elected – not to the leftwing bureaucracy,” Lee explains.
Specifically, the End EPA Abuse Act would prohibit the EPA from issuing Clean Air Act regulations that could be reasonably determined to significantly expand the Agency’s authority beyond the intent of Congress. Those include regulations the restrict the sale or use of internal combustion engines; require power plans to switch fuel sources; reduce the reliability of electric grids; require the use of technology that is economically or practically infeasible; and any far-reaching guidelines like the waivers issued to California for its electric vehicle mandate.
The End EPA Abuse Act is cosponsored by Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) in the Senate and its House version was introduced by Congressman Andrew Clyde (R-GA).
The bill is also endorsed by 13 nationwide conservative organizations and 20 state attorneys general.