Detroit Free Press Editorial Board

The Flint water crisis and the Volkswagen emissions scandal point pretty clearly to the dangers of one dynamic: the rhetorical broadsides against the government regulatory community, and the rush to undermine their ability to strike appropriate balances between efficiency and safety, between profit and public good.

Both are disasters of gargantuan proportion — unimaginable in terms of their occurrence in the planet’s wealthiest and most technologically advanced nation, and unacceptable because of their preventable nature.

The Volkswagen scandal was about corporate profiteers deciding to cheat regulatory restraints because they could, and because they knew the likelihood of being caught was low, and that the consequences if they were nabbed would probably have civil limitations.

Volkswagen put software in about 11 million diesel cars that was designed to fool emissions tests for exhaust chemicals that, unchecked, cause respiratory diseases. The actual damage to the environment is virtually incalculable. The company has reached a deal with the government, though, for $14.7 billion in payouts to customers.

Criminal charges could follow, but the way the Environmental Protection Agency's statutes work, it could be difficult to charge or get convictions in this country.

This all takes place against the backdrop of a continuing struggle in Washington to properly fund and define the scope of the EPA’s work. Much of American conservative thought right now focuses on criticizing the country’s regulatory infrastructure and insisting that business operations and profits suffer because of it.

AP source: VW reaches $14.7B emissions settlement

The strategy has been to challenge the purview of regulatory agencies like the EPA, and to try to starve them of the resources they need to rein in corporate interests so they respect the public good.

It has been working, as the agency has been backed, repeatedly, onto its heels just to defend its existence.

The most extreme iteration of this philosophy is embodied in the Republican Party’s presidential candidate, Donald Trump, who isn’t half-stepping his disdain for regulation. He says he’d scrap the EPA altogether. He said the agency is “going around causing damage, as opposed to saving damage” and is wasting “a tremendous amount of money.”

He’d return responsibility for environmental protection to “the states,” which he imagines are better equipped to strike appropriate balances between business and the environment.

Maybe he hasn’t been to Michigan.

Here, the Flint water crisis suggests the emaciated EPA is nowhere near as tattered as local environmental oversight.

Gov. Rick Snyder and his administration have insisted that the drastic cuts they made to the state's Department of Environmental Quality had little or nothing to do with the decisions that led to lead tainting Flint’s water supply.

That would be laughable if it were not such tragic self-denial.

In truth, the MDEQ has been on a 10-year budget slide, as first Gov. Jennifer Granholm, and then Snyder, cut the department deeply.

Total staffing was cut 22%, and staffing in the laboratory unit — which is critical in testing drinking water and assessing toxicity — was cut 43%. Just under Snyder’s watch, laboratory funding has fallen 21%.

VW’s future strategy doesn’t address today’s questions

Granholm’s argument was that state resources were increasingly sparse, and nearly everyone needed to take a hit. Snyder’s argument was twofold: a repeat of Granholm’s, plus an assertion that the state’s regulatory environment needed recasting.

The result, according to the task force Snyder appointed to look into causes of the Flint water crisis, is a department that has the smallest budget among environmental agencies in the Midwest, and among the largest number of community drinking water systems to oversee.

At some level, this is just about cliché: You get what you pay for.

Cut oversight dollars, and watch chaos ensue. That anyone in government is unclear on that dynamic is baffling.

But beyond that, the ideological struggle to defend regulatory schemes as imperative to human safety is tiring, and really just tired.

We don’t need more examples. We just need fortitude to stop accommodating the regulatory doubters and restore funding and staffing and legal backing for agencies like the EPA and the MDEQ to do their jobs much better than they do today.