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.

Comments

Hmm...

[KGIII]

Yes, let's cut their budget some more... "Don't give us money, we won't do our job." The question is, did they have enough money to fulfill their charter or did they just say screw it and do nothing because they didn't get what they asked for?

Re:Hmm...

[lgw]

Couldn't agree more. The EPA needs to die. We will certainly need some sort of agency to replace it, but one with a useful charter and none of the same people involved. Sure, decades later we'll be back here, but we'll have decades of sanity.

Personally I'd like to see more focus on "an oil spill happened, so EPA crews and equipment moved into place to protect the environment" than "the department of telling you you can't put your land to productive use". I doubt it's possible given modern DC, but it sure would be nice to have an agency that told a chemical plant "your emissions can't exceed X, so go hire engineers clever enough to make that true" instead of "you must buy this scrubber coincidentally only produced in the district of the concresscritter who earmarked it".

The latter is the downside of getting congress in the mix - it's an infuriating problem to engineers in the field.

Yeah, this comes as a shock

[hyades1]

Just another eff-up neoconservative Republicans will to refuse to stand accountable for.

They remind of the old story about the kid telling a grasshopper to jump, and pulling a leg off each time it hops. When he's pulled all six legs off, he concludes it's gone deaf.