EPA last week released its strategic plan for FY 2018-2022, which highlights the agency’s “Back-to-Basics” agenda. The strategic plan outlines three main goals:
- Core Mission – deliver real results to provide Americans with clean air, land and water, and ensure chemical safety;
- Cooperative Federalism – rebalance the power between Washington and the states to create tangible environmental results for the American people; and
- Rule of Law and Process – administer the law, as Congress intended, to refocus the agency on its statutory obligations under the law.
The agency listed providing safe and clean water as a key objective in its core mission. To achieve this objective, it put forward three strategic measures to be completed by the end of FY22: reduce the number of community water systems out of compliance with health-based standards to 2,700; increase by $40 billion the non-federal dollars leveraged by EPA water infrastructure finance programs (CWSRF, DWSRF and WIFIA); and reduce the number of square miles of watershed with surface water not meeting water quality standards by 37,000 square miles.
The document outlines EPA’s plan for implementing a Lean management system. Lean “is a set of principles and tools designed to identify and eliminate waste from processes while maximizing customer value and return on taxpayer investment” that will be designed to produce measurable results aligning with the strategic plan.
A main theme throughout the plan was cooperation, consistency, and certainty, particularly in regards to cooperative federalism and regulation. The measures identified to achieve these goals include reducing the backlog and meeting deadlines for Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, reducing the time between the identification of a violation and its correction, reaching all permitting-related decisions within six months and eliminating unnecessary or duplicative reporting burdens.
Missing entirely from the new strategic plan is any reference to climate change, which the 2014-2018 strategic plan listed as one of the agency’s top goals.