End of the Line for the Sue & Settle Gravy Train

This has been a highly profitable year for most of the economy, but not for the enviromoonbattery industry:

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt recently issued a directive to end a 20-year string of “sue and settle” cases that have funneled untold millions of tax dollars to environmental organizations. Predictably, those groups and their allies have been apoplectic about it.

Many of these groups have grown from grassroots citizen movements to gigantic cash-flush conglomerates, with much of the cash coming from the government they appear or pretend to be fighting. Many now have separate legal arms with hundreds of attorneys, whose primary job is to sue the government and keep the cash flowing. They are part of the $13-billion-per-year U.S. environmental industry and lobby.

Here is why the EPA constantly gets sued by NGO allies like the Sierra Club:

A “friendly” organization files a lawsuit demanding the very action the officials want to take anyway. So the government agency reaches an out-of-court settlement – often in a carefully selected friendly court – in which the agency agrees to the action demanded by the lawsuit, and agrees to pay the organization’s legal fees as part of its penance.

The court agrees to the settlement, part of which often seals the details (such as legal fees), making it difficult for anyone to track these deals.

Secrecy is the handmaiden of tyranny. Another of its handmaidens is the avoidance of political accountability.

The EPA is a malevolent operation, driven by an ideology that is not merely anti-growth but anti-human. Encouragingly, people are leaving it in droves.

Many of the disgruntled bureauweenies bailing out of the EPA will pass through the revolving door into the environmental lobby. Too bad they will arrive too late to ride the Sue & Settle gravy train.

On tips from Bodhisattva and Byron.