EDITORIAL: Government violates its own environmental standards

In today's increasingly green-minded society, private entities face a lot of pressure to follow environmental regulations at the local, state and federal levels. Failure to comply can result in significant fines, aggressive prosecution and even the shuttering and/or seizing of businesses. If private-sector firms face intense pressure to comply with environmental regulations, we could assume that entities run by governments — the institutions charged with enforcing these same regulations — would do everything they could to make sure that they are in compliance with these standards, as well.

And we would be wrong.

According to a joint study by researchers from Indiana University and Texas A&M University, governments are more likely to break environmental regulations than private-sector firms. As part of the study, researchers looked at records from thousands of publicly and privately owned power plants, hospitals and water utilities. They found that public power plants and hospitals were on average 9 percent more likely to be out of compliance with Clean Air Act regulations and 20 percent more likely to have committed high-priority violations than their private counterparts. Public water facilities had on average 14 percent more Safe Drinking Water Act health violations and were 29 percent more likely to commit monitoring violations than private facilities.

There were disparities when it came to punishment, as well. Researchers found that public power plants and hospitals that violated the Clean Air Act were 1 percent less likely than their private-sector counterparts to receive punitive sanctions and 20 percent less likely to face fines. Public water utilities that violated Safe Drinking Water Act standards were 3 percent less likely than private utilities to be punished.

The study's authors offered interesting explanations for their findings, including that governments have "different incentives" and can't come up with the funding needed to comply.

"At the same time, agencies do not face direct competition from other firms, rarely face elimination, and may have sympathetic political allies," they write.

"Consequently," they continue, "the regulator's usual array of enforcement instruments (e.g., fines, fees, and licensure) may be potent enough to alter behavior when the target is a private firm, but less effective when the regulated entity is a government agency."

It should also be noted that government officials also enjoy immunity from civil liability and have job protections that make it nearly impossible to fire them or hold them accountable. Whatever the reasons, the reality is a double standard. Government imposes one set of rules on the taxpayers who fund the government, while itself operating according to a completely different set of rules. That's an affront to the rule of law, and it highlights that the public increasingly serves government, not the other way around.