Senator John Thune
As stewards of the land, our state’s agriculture producers and property owners take seriously the responsibility of caring for our wide open spaces. Agriculture, hunting, and travel are all big business in South Dakota and greatly depend on well-maintained cropland, forestlands, and wetlands. For these reasons, more than anyone, our state’s residents have a vested interest in ensuring South Dakota remains a clean and beautiful place where people can take advantage of its natural splendor.
But the Obama Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has decided that bureaucrats in Washington know more about how to take care of our state than our residents. The EPA has been busy trying to expand its authority over the lives of Americans by arbitrarily imposing a multitude of new and expensive regulations that are leading to higher costs for middle-class families. Just this month the EPA took it to a new level, planning to bypass our judicial system and our constitutionally-protected right to due process by granting itself authority to confiscate the wages of Americans to recover non-tax related fines.
The EPA circumvented the traditional rulemaking process by assuming authority to garnish wages through a “direct final rule” that was quietly published just two days before the July 4th holiday. The EPA reportedly did so because it assumed the new authority to garnish wages would not be controversial. However, with ambiguous new rules, such as the EPA’s proposed definition of ‘waters of the United States,’ which seeks to dramatically expand the EPA’s regulatory reach to backyards and farms across America, allowing the EPA to garnish wages of hardworking Americans is not only controversial, it is unconscionable.
One example is from a private landowner in Wyoming who received a compliance order from the EPA threatening fines up to $187,500 per day for building a pond on his property. More and more landowners will be subject to fines and penalties under the EPA’s expanded authority, and if the EPA wage garnishing rule is allowed to move forward, private landowners could be economically crushed by the fines garnished from their wages without a court order.
On July 16th the EPA pulled the direct final rule due to the public backlash from Congress and the American public. However, EPA officials have said they will continue to pursue this authority through traditional rulemaking, and I plan to fight this proposal at every opportunity.
The Obama EPA continues to pander to the extremist environmental groups by imposing costly, job-killing regulations on American families and businesses. As middle-class families struggle to make ends meet under higher energy costs and fewer jobs, the EPA’s agenda and its pursuit to garnish wages from individuals is yet another example of how this administration is out of touch with South Dakota.