Formally or informally, scholars widely assume that political and bureaucratic self-interest largely determines the character of public policy in the United States. Previous research has indicated how the political self-interest of voters, interest groups, Congress, and the President might shape the goals and broad patterns of resource allocation in U.S. environmental policy.¹ This Dialogue complements that previous research. It explores the relationship between congressional self-interest, bureaucratic self-interest, and the implementation of U.S.

The U.S. Supreme Court's recent campaign to curtail congressional authority to legislate under the U.S. Commerce Clause has inevitably fostered speculation about the validity of parts of the Clean Water Act (CWA), the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and other federal environmental laws—heightened by the Court's recent decision to hear just such a claim. One view is that the decisions since United States v.

The environmental justice movement seems to have come of age. The past two decades have seen increasing empirical evidence documenting racial disparities in sitinghazardous waste facilities and a nascent grass-roots movement bearing witness to the disproportionate effects of numerous environmental and health hazards in low-income communities of color.¹ Never have environmental justice claims been taken so seriously in environmental policymaking and adjudication than they have over the past five years.

Overview

In thoughtful dicta uttered 60 years ago, Justice Frankfurter observed that even a legislature clear as to its regulatory objectives faces hard choices in selecting remedies for the implementation of those objectives:

As we wrote last year, the U.S.

Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits federal agencies from providing financial assistance to recipients that commit discrimination. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) Title VI regulations prohibit both intentional and unintentional discrimination by state and local agencies receiving Agency funds. However, these regulations were written before the question of environmental inequities became a serious public concern and do not explain how the Agency will define or measure adverse disparate impacts that result from a recipient's permitting decisions.

Imagine that new neighbors move in next door and begin building an addition on their home that blocks the sun, crowds your property, and obstructs you view of the park down the street. Unpleasant? Now imagine that the rights to mine the property next door—more than 8,000 acres (approximately 12 square miles)—is bought by the Arch Coal Company and that your new neighbor will soon be blasting off the tops of the surrounding mountains, cutting trees, burying the nearby streams with rubble, and killing all the wildlife in the process.

This Dialogue discusses the recent decision in Byrd v. EPA¹ regarding the scope and application of the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA).² According to the court's opinion, the U.S.

The standard arguments for smart growth rely on "the substitution of an agreeable or inoffensive expression for one that may offend or suggest something unpleasant"—to quote the dictionary's definition of a euphemism.¹ "Smart growth" is, of course, itself a feel-good term. But it is by no means the only one. Almost as pervasive are terms like "sustainability" and "livable communities."² Who could be for dumb growth or think that unsustainable, unlivable places were desirable?