Government agencies are more likely to pollute — and less likely to be punished

Mitchell Power Station in New Eagle, PA.

(Image credit: Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)

last updated 16 October 2015

Government-owned facilities like power plants, hospitals, and water utilities pollute in violation of environmental laws more often than their private counterparts — but they get punished less often.

For example, public hospitals and power plants are 20 percent more likely to commit high priority violations of the Clean Air Act but also 20 percent less likely to be fined when compared to private facilities. This and similar findings were derived from analysis of the records of 3,000 power plants, 1,000 hospitals, and 4,200 water utilities published in the American Journal of Political Science.

The study authors suggest that it is more difficult for public agencies to comply with regulations, but they also note that "agencies do not face direct competition from other firms, rarely face elimination, and may have sympathetic political allies." As a result, "the regulator's usual array of enforcement instruments (e.g., fines, fees, and licensure) may be potent enough to alter behavior when the target is a private firm, but less effective when the regulated entity is a government agency."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Explore More

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

Subscribe to The Week

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox