Environmental Protection Agency

The overarching mission of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is to protect human health and the environment by implementing and enforcing environmental laws intended to improve the quality of our air and water and to protect our land such as the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, Toxic Substances Control Act, and Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (Superfund). EPA’s policies and programs affect virtually all segments of the economy and levels of government. Industries in the United States with the highest pollution abatement capital expenditures and operating costs were in petroleum and coal products manufacturing and in chemical manufacturing. In 2005, United States manufacturers spent more than $26 billion on pollution abatement and control, with the greatest expenditures attributed to air emissions, water discharge, and solid waste, according to a 2008 Census report Nevertheless, approximately 138 million people in 105 metropolitan areas live in areas that do not meet health based national air quality standards for ozone, particulate matter or both, and about 45 percent of the nation’s 3.7 million miles of rivers and streams are still polluted. EPA’s efforts to ensure environmental quality have become increasingly complicated as scientific understanding of the effects of toxic chemicals improves. In addition emerging issues such as climate change--one of the federal government’s and indeed the world’s most complex environmental challenges—suggest that EPA’s responsibilities will continue to grow.

Organizational, EPA is comprised of major offices aligned with environmental laws, each headed by a politically appointed Assistant Administrator, and 10 regional offices, each headed by a politically appointed regional administrator. For fiscal year 2010, the agency requested $10.5 billion, including about $1.07 billion for clean air and climate change, $5.1 billion for clean and safe water, and $1.8 billion for land preservation and restoration.

• EPA's budget, like that of many civil agencies, has been declining over the past several years, exacerbating the implementation and enforcement of the nation's environmental laws.
• EPA shares responsibility for enforcement of environmental laws with its 10 semiautonomous regions as well as states, causing uneven enforcement from region to region and state to state.
• EPA must balance the cost (to industry and others) of implementing regulations to benefit public health and the environment—a controversial proposition depending upon one's point of view.
• EPA is often relegated to being reactionary rather than strategic in its approach to implementing environmental laws such as the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Superfund program because of the need to comply with numerous court orders emanating from the myriad lawsuits brought against the agency by states, concerned citizens, special interest groups, and others.
• Lack of complete and comprehensive environmental information on air or water quality, for example, makes it difficult for EPA to evaluate the success of its policies and programs.
• EPA does not have sufficient chemical assessment information to determine whether it should establish controls to limit public exposure to many chemicals that may post substantial health risks. As a result, in January 2009, GAO added transforming EPA's process for assessing and controlling toxic chemicals to its list of high-risk areas warranting attention by Congress and the executive branch

  Highlights of GAO-09-271 (PDF)

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Environmental Protection Agency

Measuring Our Nation's Natural Resources and Environmental Sustainability

Environmental Protection

Environmental Indicators