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EPA Gave Volkswagen a Free Pass On Emissions Ten Years Ago Due To Lack of Budget
An anonymous reader writes: A new report suggests that continuing cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency's budget contributed to Volkswagen being able to cheat on its emissions tests. When the test scripts were developed the department — which can still only conduct 'spot tests' on 20% of all qualifying vehicles — was forced to concentrate on heavy machinery and truck manufacturers, which at the time had a far higher incidence of attempting to cheat on vehicle standards tests. Discounting inflation the EPA's 2015 budget is on a par with its 2002 budget (PDF), and has been cut by 21% since 2010.
Every time I've been exposed to the operational aspects of a government agency (and, unfortunately, most large non-profits and even some large corporations) I see things being done in a way that costs around five times as much as we would do it in small- to mid-scale private industry, and even at that expense level the quality of work is outright appalling. When you start working with the management of these organizations, they simply don't care about setting appropriate standards for what they can achieve on a certain budget and then squeezing things to make do with what they have. Quite the contrary, their incentives are structured around having as much budget as possible. So bloat is everywhere, and the response to any additional "needs" is to demand more money. This is an endless cycle - giving them more money will never achieve their goals, because that would harm management's careers.
Privatizing these functions is its own can of worms - it's often far cheaper (see: SpaceX vs. NASA), but still a long way away from excellent, and rife with corruption and politics (see: Military-Industrial Complex, Prison-Industrail Complex, etc).
If I really wanted to have the EPA catch these things the best method I can think of would be to offer bounties paid on caught cheaters. This creates incentives to check everything everywhere, and retains the incentives to maximize efficiency.
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Implicit collusion. They're likely all cheating, on something. So if they report VW, VW reports w/e they're cheating on. So no one tattles.
No, it wouldn't the first time. Nor the first hundredth time. This is one of Congress's favorite tricks. Can't get rid of an agency outright? Papercut it to death.
NASA, EPA, NRC and pretty much anything that doesn't blow things up or walk around in the dark....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Why do we assume that all government agencies need an endlessly increasing budget to do their job? Why do we accept endlessly increasing government budgets? We have a kneejerk belief that money fixes everything, but it seems only to bring more corruption, entitlement and fewer freedoms.
There is this concept of inflation. It works for the universe and pretty much everything else except, apparently, intelligence.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
VW is a shining (well, maybe not shining) example of what happens when you allow industry to self-regulate.
I've wondered about this. Honda engineers publicly stated that they didn't understand how Volkswagen did it. Honda is a big company with huge engineering chops. They build all manner of one off things. They undoubtedly test all manner of technology. The smoking gun here was run by a consumer protection agency and a small university. Certainly the engineering might of the other carmakers could have managed this.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Exactly. The cumulative rate of inflation between 2002 and 2015 was about 32%. Kind of hard to get the same value out of the 2002 level budget when everything costs 32% more.
and where are "private independent companies" going to get their funding? You do realize that the "free market" doesn't just print more money, right?
Its really strange that you go from "don't bash the EPA for congress not funding them" to "EPA has proved that they are useless" with an even more extraneous "yet again" (as you don't mention any previous EPA failures).
I'm just trying to understand your jump from facts to fiction.
The extreme right wants to prove that any government regulations are wasteful and ineffectual. To make certain that all programs fail they insist on severely under funding the programs at which point they do become wasteful and ineffectual. There followers are so stupid that they can't even see what is actually going on.
Who signs off on the budget?
The 535 members of Congress who voted for or against the 12 appropriation bills that make up the budget before sending it to the president for his signatures. AFAIK, the House Republicans haven't written a single appropriation bill that was due at the end of the fiscal year two days ago. This is why the Congress voted on a Continuing Resolution to maintain government funding at existing levels and the president signed to keep the government open until mid-December. If blaming Obama makes you feel good, by all means blame Obama.
So you're saying the 2002 budget should cover the 2015 expenses because... productivity? The EPA isn't running out to walmart to buy a bunch of mass market testing equipment. Their work requires highly specialized training and equipment, productivity doesn't significantly enter into it. Their methodology has to change year to year to match regulations and changes in technology. I don't know how strongly their expenses track the CPI but facility, utility, salary, transportation and training costs are all affected by the inflation rate. The idea that they should be able to provide services at the same cost over a 13 year period without a budget increase is ludicrous.
you're commenting under a story in which the EPA is underfunded and as a result is unable to do it's job, and so a corporation got away with polluting on a massive scale
and your response is: disband them, and only *clean up* messes, instead of *prevent* them
seriously? you're not trolling or making a sarcastic joke?
profoundly, amazingly stupid
i always wondered at the source of this form of idiocy: "government isn't doing it's job, so destroy it" rather than gee, i dunno, fix the fucking problem preventing them from doing their fucking job?
because if no one does the job government is supposed to do, the world will be better? how does that work? no need to regulate markets. no need to prevent pollution, no need to police the food or drug supply? because as history clearly shows, nevermind current fucking events like bp oil spill, this volkswagen story, the peanut salmonella case x1,000,000 other examples: when corporations can get away with crime, *they do*
why are there so many morons like you in this world who see government as the problem, and not the corporations doing all the actual, criminal wrong?
look at the comments under this story
1. industry cheated na dpolluted
2. government is underfunded so it fucked up
and what do we have... criticisms of govt, no criticisms of industry, and calls to disband the very agency tasked with policing the scumbags in industry fucking up
how... the... fuck
"corporation {xyz} did horrible thing dumping pollution... but that's not the problem, the epa screwed up the clean up, that's the real problem!"
really?
seriously, how can people be so fucking stupid on this point?
how can this incredible blindness about the repeated malfeasance and ineptitude in business escape your attention or derision, but only government, which you fucking need to prevent and control and punish these corporate assholes, is always the culprit?
this guy:
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
he's real
he exists. he'll poison your children, he'll kill you, he'll render vast areas uninhabitable. all to make $10 more
time and time and time again throughout history, there's millions of examples of this
but no, he's not the problem: government screwed up the investigation, the cleanup, the prevention. therefore, let's focus all our rage there and ignore the criminals out there screwing up your lives and your communities
WTF?
why are you morons and assholes so blind to this?
you rage at government and give industry a pass: why???
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'm sorry but EPA not having enough money is bullshit. They "only" have enough money to test 20% of new cars, therefore Volkswagon was able to cheat, so give us more money?
IRS tests (audits) less than one percent of income tax returns. Yet tax compliance is quite high in the United States, relatively to other countries. Why is that? Because IRS has teeth and people know if you get caught flagrantly cheating on your taxes, they can seize your bank accounts and your house and put you in jail.
Testing 20% is more than enough, you just gotta give EPA some teeth. Start by putting VW CEO in jail and seizing $8 billion from their bank account. That's still less than a year worth of profit for them, it won't make them go out of business. But it's enough that people will get the message quick.
Car companies have brazenly cheated emissions because the price of getting caught (nobody goes to prison, a few million dollars in fines) was far less than the money saved by cheating on emissions. If the price goes up, the equation changes.