Why Do EPA Employees Make More Than the Vice President?

Here is a curious thing. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has somehow been given authority to pay some of its employees more than we pay the vice president of the United States of America! How is it that a mere perfunctory agency can pay more to its civil service employees than we pay the second most powerful man in our government?

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Apparently Health and Human Services (HHS) was given special pay authority under Title 42, Section 209(f) of the U.S. Code and the EPA has glommed on to that authority to pay some scientific employees higher salaries than they could earn under the normal Civil Service system. But Representatives Joe Barton (R-Texas) and Greg Walden (R-Oregon), ranking members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, claim that the EPA isn’t legally entitled to “cash in” on the HHS special pay provisions.

“EPA is an independent agency, not part of HHS or the Public Health Service,” Barton and Walden wrote to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson. “We are curious how EPA can legally use statutory authority explicitly committed to the Public Health Service and the Surgeon General, particularly the special consultant authority in 209(f).”

So how did this all happen? According to Barton and Greg, the EPA used the HHS statute to “concoct an alternative pay system for themselves.”

“It looks like the EPA has dug into a Clinton-era personnel statute that was meant to retain a handful of key scientists at the Health and Human Services Department and found a cash cow living there, and used it to concoct an alternative pay system for themselves that’s miles away from any public accountability,” Barton added in a separate statement. “As a consequence, some employees get tens of thousands of extra dollars on top of the hefty retention bonuses they’ve collected. If EPA can cash in, anybody can, and salary schemes will grow like kudzu throughout the federal government. I understand the need to hang on to world-class scientists for their distinct value in government service, but paying anybody else more than the vice president makes is both a distortion and not right.”

And this is precisely where we are with a federal government out of control. Here we have the EPA simply deciding to pick and choose whatever statutes it feels that it wants to use to increase its power and the size of its budget. It doesn’t matter if it is legal or right the EPA just decided to do it without asking anyone. And a Democrat controlled government unconcerned with the rule of law simply OKs this wild overstepping of authority? Seems so. But even though this has been happening since the Bush administration, this shows that government has grown so large that no one even knows what is going on inside it. Departments simply write their own rules and then apply to the federal treasury for money to fund what ever they want to fund. It must be nice to know that you have a bottomless pit of money available to fund your every desire! Too bad the folks paying the bills are stuck with financial reality.