Big Government Bureaucrats Know Best:  Here We Go Again

In 1994, when I was a policy staffer at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, DC, a letter was sent to the agency Administrator from a Congressman who posed a simple but illuminating question to the agency: How many EPA staff came from farming or natural resource management backgrounds?

Given how many expensive regulations that the agency was issuing that affected farmers, it was a good question, and the agency leaders appeared to take the question seriously. A survey was passed around among staff and returned to the Congressman three weeks later.

Out of thousands of employees, few had any direct connection to farming or other natural resource management. The vast majority of the agency’s policy staff, scientists, and regulators grew up in suburban and urban environments, and they gained their expertise through academic study and working on the issues over time at the agency. A few had state-level experience before they joined the EPA, which is superior because it’s closer to the action and actual people. Out of our immediate group of about 100 people, I and another young guy named Mike B. were the only ones who came from farming backgrounds.

Mike and I finished both college (me Penn State and him Nebraska) and graduate school at the same time. EPA was the first professional job for either of us, and we worked hard. But within one year we also began noting the differences in the way that we handled policy issues from other staff. While we shared the classic PSU-Nebraska football rivalry, we both also talked about our common experiences with hunting, wildlife conservation, and farm life to the chagrin of many of our colleagues. We noticed that no matter how we explained to them that heavy-handed regulation was bad for farmers, we were rarely listened to. Most of the policy staff enjoyed crunching numbers over real life facts, and although my own academic studies focused on using quantitative methods to achieve balanced regulations, much of the regulatory activity there was separated from reality. It is intriguing to me that both Mike and I left EPA and went back to our respective homes, me to central Pennsylvania and Mike to Nebraska, where he rejoined his family on their large grain farm. What bothered me the most about much of the regulation that I experienced was that so much effort and cost were incurred to achieve so little in actual risk reduction.

Washington, DC, bureaucrats, have struck once again, this time from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (who has even heard of this outfit? Is it the same one that allowed decrepit, unlicensed Mexican trucks to drive on American highways under NAFTA?). They have just dumped unnecessary, heavy handed regulations onto farmers, this time requiring drivers of farm tractors and most farm trucks to engage in incredible amounts of record keeping and documentation. Typical of most modern regulations, the goal here again seems to be almost zero risk reduction at great expense, effort, disruption, and a likelihood of picayune enforcement actions that drive the final nails into our family farms’ coffins. Without family farms, there’s no farmland, much less hunting land, more development and impaired watersheds, less wildlife, and a loss of scenery.

As a Republican Congressional candidate with Washington regulatory experience, who left Washington because of this sort of regulatory overkill masquerading as government’s purpose, it is my goal to bring common sense back to the out-of-touch bureaucrats there. This time around, I will do more than write a letter; I will write legislation that prevents government agencies from engaging in this sort of destructive activity in the first place.

Josh First is a business man from Harrisburg.