Caught on Video: EPA Admits It Doesn't Care About Jobs

If President Barack Obama is serious about getting the nation back to work, then he didn't get the message across to one of his largest federal arms, the Environmental Protection Agency.

The massive EPA, which boasts 18,000 full-time employees, a $10 billion budget, and the power to impose economy-crippling regulations on the American way of life, has admitted a dangerous truth: Jobs plain don't matter.

How do we know? In a hearing Thursday before the House Environment and Economy Subcommittee, U.S. Rep. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., questioned EPA Assistant Administrator Mathy Stanislaus on the agency's economic analyses related to legislation. Really Gardner was asking if the EPA considers the effect its regulations have on jobs. His answer: No, it does not directly examine regulations impacts on jobs.

What you want to do is have a look at the full exchange in the video here, as presented by the Heritage Foundation.

The EPAs failure to account for jobs goes against the president's own executive order:

Here it is: Executive order 13563, of Jan. 18, 2011: Improving Regulation and Regulatory Review --

"Section 1. General Principles of Regulation. (a) Our regulatory system must protect public health, welfare, safety, and our environment while promoting economic growth, innovation, competitiveness, and job creation."

Heritage Foundation's Nicolas Loris writes this: "[U]nelected bureaucrats at the EPA are attempting to bypass the legislative process through regulatory dictate by using the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon dioxide. The problem is that Congress never intended the Clean Air Act to cover CO2 and the result of doing so would extract trillions of dollars from our economy and destroy over 1 million jobs. Worse yet, there would be no demonstrable benefit to the environment."

Sounds exactly like the agency is trying to do in Florida, by imposing its out-of-nowhere "numeric nutrient criteria" -- supposedly for improving the quality of the state's water supply.

U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio and virtually every public official in the state of Florida opposes the EPA mandate. This is an excerpt from a letter in opposition that Rubio wrote recently:

There have been numerous concerns raised regarding the numeric nutrient criteria set by the EPA. Cost estimates have been widely disparate. The EPA estimates that implementation of the standards would cost $135.5 million to $206.1 million annually. However, the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services has determined that the new standards would cost $1.148 billion annually. Despite the massive discrepancy, to date the EPA has refused a congressional request to conduct an independent analysis of the economic impacts."
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