RC. your thinking that we have any need or use for the EPA is silly.
I can tell you that since I was a boy, America, state by state and town by town has been moving in the right direction, to clean up water, air, and soil.
But local governments have been doing it responsibly.
your solution-—that these issues need to be handled at a federal level by unaccountable bureaucrats is mistaken. The EPA, Like the Department of Education, has always been redundant and injurious.
Nobody in their right mind wants polluted air or soil or water.
OTOH, when “pollution” includes dust from forest roads, and at the same time, oils on said roads to control dust...and is now moving to “control” dust from plowing a farmer's field, and all without any, let alone reasonable, cost-benefit criteria allowed...
When cities and counties are FINED by the feds for “pollution violations” due to smoke from forest fires the feds ordered to be allowed to burn ‘for habitat enhancement’...
Yes, I lived in the era when raw sewerage was ignorantly and shamefully dumped in San Francisco Bay; now, to perpetuate a bureaucracy, TERTIARY treatment plants must be built to satisfy ever more stringent RULES said bureaucrats decide are mandated by the original laws...
It boils down to, “how clean is clean?”
The answer is, “never clean enough, if it means loss, rather than growth, of the regulator's power and budget.”
Thanks to the EPA, we have CO^2 listed as a pollutant; we have landfills built and contained in such a manner that the contents are unable to effectively biodegrade, other than the anaerobically rotting, methane (”1600 times worse than CO^2” according to the same people) producing wet garbage...
Like the Russians discovered about the Communist state, bureaucracies do not wither away “when their job is done”; they find ways to expand and perpetuate themselves, until killed.
If your state doesn't want to enforce its environmental regulations, that is a job for the citizenry.
This is not to say we shouldn't have such laws a Clean Air Act, etc; but that we should not have a huge federal agency “overseeing” it. There are enough federal law enforcement agencies and federal courts to take care of interstate violations; and state courts and legislatures to sue through, or enact/change laws to force state or local jurisdictions to prevent “raw sewage and toxic sludge being dumped in the field across the street from my well.”