Mr. Nixon gave the EPA too much power when he created it, or did the agency just amass that power since then?
The answer to your question is “yes”.
There was a sense I think, I was just a kid, that the problems were too big and crossed too many state lines to coordinate the best responses. And it’s true that most of the waterways looked like crud, there was considerable burning that went on. They said it wouldn’t do this and it wouldn’t do that and so they created it and it turned into every bit the monster that the conservatives had predicted it would be. They’re like the FBI a bit, or were. Outside the constitution, outside direct control. If only we could deconstruct the FBI the way Pruitt is deconstructing EPA. People would sleep better in their beds. What is the FBI for anyway? Investigating WHAT?
Probably both but they ignored laws often when they created new, expensive regulations and no-one ever stopped them.
“Mr. Nixon gave the EPA too much power when he created it, or did the agency just amass that power since then?”
Yes, but he had a lot of “help” from the Congress. It’s always the same old story with new “agencies.” They get some really sketchy “guideline law” and then they tell the agency to “have at it with unfettered and unmonitored regulations. And of course there isn’t a federal agency that doesn’t grow by leaps and bounds adding people and office space. President Eisenhower said of the Department of Agriculture way back in the 1950’s, “It’s hard to be a farmer when you plow is a pencil and you’re 2,000 miles from a cornfield!”