Much is made of various candidates vowing to completely dismantle obsolete or counter-productive agencies (Education, Energy, etc.) but the hit list needs to be much wider. The agencies in the crosshairs have the same paradigm. If you asked the FBI what that agency is, they tell you it is a law-enforcement agency. And indeed it is. They enforce federal statutes, passed by Congress. Their vigor in enforcing different statutes varies but that is another issue. If you asked the EPA, they say the same thing but they are lying. The EPA only indirectly enforces the Clean Air Act. What the EPA does is promulgate and enforce regulations. Regulations are enforced by civil courts and as such have a MUCH lower burden of proof than true law-enforcement actions. The EPA (and other job-killing agencies like them) make up regulations with nearly no oversight from Congress. Then they enforce them. This paradigm came from the first such agency the Interstate Commerce Commission. The ICC was set up in 1884 to regulate railroad rates. Later they pickup up trucking, internal maritime and freshwater shipping, and airline rates. Slow ICC rate-making was a major factor in the decline of the US railroad industry. By 1978, when the Rock Island Railroad went under, they had nearly killed the industry. Congress could no longer ignore the orgy of bureaucratic arrogance and with the Staggers Act in 1979, deregulated the railroads. Shortly later, everything else was deregulated and the ICC got sunsetted. The FAA carried this to an art form. When it was formed, nobody in congress knew anything about aviation, so they turned to Orville Wright. Orville used the ICC pattern. The FAA made up regs on a whim, assured compliance and enforced them. Once a reg was on the books it was never revisited. It is a standing joke in aviation that one of Orvilles regs a prohibition against the pilot-in-command wearing spurs is still on the books. Spurs. You know for riding a horse. Whats worse, one supposes that the co-pilot (or flight engineer or navigator back when they still had them) were not prohibited from wearing spurs. Regs are easily promulgated and rarely ever rescinded. Environmental codes and aviation regs approach the tax code for volume. Small wonder the economy is so constipated. Integrated (in that they both make and enforce regs) have to go. Congress has had long enough to figure out the technical aspects of various sectors. Agencies like the EPA and FAA need to be stripped of their regulation-promulgating authority. Make them more like the FBI.
