That the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency seems a bit slow in doing its job in Louisiana is the wages of its now-excised obsession with conspiracy theories centered on race.

The EPA has come under criticism for a seemingly-slow response to an accident at Smitty’s Supply in Tangipahoa Parish, where an explosion and fire have spread chemical residue far and wide. Concerns have mounted about environmental contamination, and both the EPA and Republican Gov. Jeff Landry, with the state response somewhat tethered to the EPA’s, have pledged and pointed to increased urgency in the cleanup.

Unrelated but another complaint about slowness in EPA response comes from researchers at Louisiana State University. They have developed an environmentally friendly and humane method to put to death outlaw quadrupeds of the porcine variety. Feral hogs do considerable damage to agriculture and even flood control efforts, and this method of scattering rubber ball-sized bait that seems to light up their taste buds but doesn’t harm other wildlife promises to be a much more effective tactic in population control than hunting. But the product isn’t in circulation because the EPA has to approve of it, and the process is long and convoluted. Attention paid to it, however, could be streamlined and hastened.

Contrast this with the vigor that the EPA – at least since 2009, although the early 2017 to early 2021 period saw a suspension of such activities – until this year had demonstrated in trying to foist the environmental racism canard onto public policy. Fortunately, with the election of Republican Pres. Donald Trump, his administration turned the EPA back into applying science, not dogma, to carry out its duties by refusing to bend the law to provide cover for those actions.

Not that there weren’t casualties in Louisiana. Just before the election, an expansion of a grain elevator near the Mississippi River got canceled invoking reasoning traced back to the narrative. And even after Trump took office and started to reverse questionable EPA actions including punitive regulations of the nation’s only neoprene producer, located in Louisiana, the company decided to shut down the operation, citing as one reason a regulatory climate even if relief were on the way was too distant. And while the Trump Administration began pulling out the environmental racism faith and diversity, equity, and inclusion mania roots within two months of the president reassuming office, the impetus from four years of relentless pursuit of these will take much longer to halt. Hundreds of jobs and related economic activity have been lost for nothing.

Of course, this agenda distracted the EPA from its main duties these past years, sapping its institutional capabilities to perform the tasks that it should and actually genuinely contribute to Americans’ well-being. The money wasted on such things was enormous. The Administration reported $20 billion going to broader catastrophic anthropogenic global warming-related purposes that it canceled, including grants, of which at least $1.7 billion went to environmental justice and DEI measures. That doesn’t include money already out the door in the previous four years.

Even a fraction of that total, given an EPA budget in recent years that hovered around the $10 billion mark, steered into its more traditional functions would have done wonders to improve its service level. It wasn’t and now Louisiana is paying the price for this slavishness to political fashion thankfully excised.