SCANT 25 YEARS AGO, NO EPA, EDUCATION AND $1 TRILLION LESS

One index of the federal government's explosive growth is that today's annual federal budget is in the $1.6 trillion range. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter's final year in office and a scant 15 years ago, the federal government spent a little over $600 billion. Thus a trillion dollars in annual spending has been added in that time. (So much for the allegedly draconian "cuts" of the Reagan-Bush years that account for most of that tenure.)

Another such index is the existence of the federal Department of Education, created by Mr. Carter in 1979 as a payoff to the first-ever endorsement of a presidential candidacy by a teachers union, the National Education Association. This department, which didn't exist 16 years ago, today spends over $30 billion annually as its bureaucrats preside over a catastrophic slide in the test scores of American youngsters. It is fair to say that if a foreign power had done to American inner city schools what the education bureaucrats have done to them, while spending us into the poorhouse, we would have considered it an act of war. As for the money itself, who among us doesn't think that such expenditures, or a portion of them, couldn't be more wisely and effectively spent at the state and local level?

Another index of federal overreaching is surely the Environmental Protection Agency, created in 1973 under the administration of Richard Nixon. Twenty years ago this agency had 4,000 employees. Today it plods on with 18,000 bureaucrats, threatening to become a government within a government. (The EPA has its analogue with a state-level Department of Natural Resources, which until 20 years ago ran our parks and today, increasingly, runs our lives. Just ask any business person.)

Evidence of EPA abuses abound and have been visited on law-abiding citizens here in Southeast Missouri and across the nation. EPA arrogance in the Kem-Pest Superfund case reached a level so offensive and so indefensible that they received a judicial rebuke from U.S. District Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh. In a case that had national implications when he ruled two years ago, Judge Limbaugh felt constrained to remind EPA bureaucrats that they are not the "administrative deity" that their behavior had demonstrated them to believe themselves to be. The EPA appealed to the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld Judge Limbaugh's sanctions against the agency.

Speaking of the Superfund, created under President Carter to clean up hazardous waste sites, it has been a colossal failure. Fewer than 10 percent of the thousands of allegedly contaminated sites have been cleaned up, but billions of dollars have been spent.

Something is clearly wrong. It seems clear that EPA and other bureaucrats erred fundamentally when they adopted a command-and-control model for dealing with abuses. While it may have once been true that American industry was full of bad actors where environmental pollution is concerned, 25 years after the first Earth Day those days are surely behind us. Like the farmers and ranchers on whom EPA is increasingly descending, the vast majority of business people earnestly want to be good stewards of the environment. In this effort, they should be encouraged.

Into this counterproductive regulatory mess has stepped Missouri Sen. Kit Bond. "I want to be sure that EPA's budget is going to the most important, high-risk environmental issues," said Bond in announcing plans to overhaul EPA's operations. "We can no longer afford to clean up the last part per trillion of every compound in the environment." Sen. Bond is demanding that EPA delegate more to the states and work closely with industry to identify and remediate real environmental threats.

This is sound thinking, and it is encouraging to see it coming from a Senate subcommittee chairman who has considerable clout in enforcing this common-sense approach. Should Sen. Bond's approach prevail, it will bring long-overdue balance back into environmental regulation. This is a crucial part of the new Republican effort to rein in a bloated and overreaching federal government.