Ninety-eight percent of Environmental Protection Agency regulations for three core Clean Air Act programs were implemented late, according to a new study by William Yeatman of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. While delaying EPA regulations may be seen as beneficial to the economy, failure to implement them in a timely fashion has encouraged the use of “sue and settle” lawsuits that enable special interests to dictate policy implementation in cahoots with the unelected bureaucrats of the environmental agency.

Yeatman found that 200 regulations for the three programs have been implemented over the past two decades. However, just four (2 percent) were promulgated by the statutory deadline. The other 196 were late, by an average of 2,072 days (more than five-and-a-half years). EPA’s inability to adhere to congressionally mandated deadlines has effectively opened the door for special interests to dictate policy. “If the EPA is out of compliance with virtually all of its deadlines,” Yeatman said, “then clearly the agency has limited resources relative to its responsibilities. As a result, establishing any deadline determines how the EPA deploys its limited resources, which is no different than rendering policy.”