Will Supersized Government Agencies Be the ‘Legacy’ of the Biden Administration? What Will the Damage Be?

Joe Biden’s massive climate spending package that was signed into law on Tuesday will give over $40 billion to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). That is partnered with the fact that the bill allocates almost $80 billion to expand the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

The misnomered bill called the Inflation Reduction Act also includes $369 billion in total climate spending. A byproduct of all of this spending will be to supersize these government agencies.

The EPA gets more than $40 billion in the current fiscal year to combat climate change and enforce environmental standards. Some have indicated that the Congressional Research Service report says the EPA plans to secure “environmental justice.”

The budget for this past year at the EPA was just $9.5 billion, according to the agency figures. So this bill will more than quadruple the EPA’s current annual spending. 

The IRS gets $80 billion in new funding and they will hire 87,000 new agents, ramp up auditing and other enforcement platforms. 

The new supersized EPA will allocate $27 billion in accordance with the Clean Air Act to start a “Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund” that will finance competitive grants to fund “green banks.” These will pay for initiatives and projects that focus on reducing carbon emissions. 

The Democrats are planning to put $8 billion in total to reduce air pollution at ports and fund general pollution reduction grants. 

And the bill allots $3 billion for EPA “environmental and climate justice block grants” that will help facilitate political “engagement in disadvantaged communities.”

EPA Administrator Michael Regan praised the bill’s passage and said that the massive spending bill will cause the EPA’s regulatory efforts to accelerate and it will further the Biden Administration’s aggressive climate agenda. 

With budgets quadrupling, it’s hard to imagine what these monster departments in government will be capable of. The stakes are so high in the midterms this November.