Closing the EPA and the Department of Education

    I recently took a quote from the Washington Times concerning the fact that retired EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson had set up a fictitious straw man to do the heavy work of providing "qualified" professional advice to Ms. Jackson, where she was not herself qualified.
    One of my political Associates responded with a suggestion that the EPA should be eliminated, and he also included the Department of Education.
   

My reply is as follows:

    The EPA was originally set up by Congress to control toxic chemicals in the environment.

    Toxic is a general term. A chemical can be acute, which means a quick killer, or chronic, which means that it does extensive damage over a longer period of time. Some chronic effects are cancer, and endocrine disruption, of which the latter leads to abnormal development in young humans.
    There are hundreds of thousands of chemical materials in the environment, many of which are synthetics introduced by chemical companies. We need an organization to control these, so that dangerous materials are not inadvertently released on the public. Chemical companies obviously feel the responsibility, but there should be government control and the program set up by Congress seems to me appropriate. If we don't have an EPA, we need an equivalent controlling organization. I believe we should maintain the EPA, but significantly reduce its responsibilities and activities to those of public protection of chemicals in the environment.
    With respect to the Department of Education, I can think of no value that it gives to our educational system.

    Any federal program is intended to establish a set of rules which are perfect in the opinion of the originating department, but that may not be correct. We do not need a single wrong system of education. Our educational system already has many bad points, although it is not all bad.

    We need diversity to let market forces operate in the educational system as it does in other aspects of our society. High school programs should not be uniformly dictated by the Department of Education. Each local school board should set up a program which it believes is appropriate for its constituents. Government grants to local school system should be completely eliminated, because with the present system of grants go responsibilities of local schools to operate in a manner dictated by the federal government.

    Our college and university system is rampant with leftists teaching their students how to be better socialists/communists. Leftists always operate on the basis of other people's money. In this case, large amounts of money go into the college/university system from federal grants from various agencies. That should be completely eliminated, which will tend to place the economic basis of those organizations more on a market requirement than on a government dictated program.

    I agree that the Department of Education should be completely eliminated, but as mentioned above, there are also ancillary operations which should be eliminated as well.