by Richard A. Halpern

About the author: Richard A. Halpern is the director of environmental affairs for the Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Food Issues. The Hudson Institute is a conservative public policy research organization with offices in Indianapolis and Washington, D.C.

In 2000, when [former] Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Carol Browner was refining a sweeping new clean-water rule, she said that it would finally enable us, twenty-eight years after passage of the Clean Water Act, to “finish the job of restoring the nation’s waters”—in another fifteen or twenty-five years. The environmental groups pushing for the rules were furious and fired off an angry letter to Browner: “This delay is both unconscionable and contrary to law.” They argued that in 1972 Congress intended “that water- quality standards be attained...