ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the demands for regulatory efficiency and a greater reliance on economic expertise as part of a larger dynamic of institution building in the United States. It considers the politics of regulatory design. Reform advocates commonly critique the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as inefficient. The chapter examines the original design of the EPA. It explores the demands for economically oriented reforms through the lens of regulatory design, focusing on regulatory review, the growing use of market-based instruments, and recent efforts to reinvent regulation to leverage market forces and trends in corporate environmentalism. The environmental initiatives of the 1970s were the product of a new policy subsystem that linked environmental interest groups, key congressional subcommittees and the EPA. Largely as a result of economic professionalization and the imposition of regulatory review, there was a growing willingness within the EPA to experiment with market-based instruments.
