Government…what’s it good for? Turns out, not much. The latest evidence supporting that notion is the disaster caused by the Environmental Protection Agency.

In early August, the EPA, the supreme protectors of the environment that they are, single-handedly jeopardized the life of an entire river and the networks to which it connects. Working on the Gold King Mine near Silverton, Colo., the EPA let 3 million gallons of toxic water seep into the Animas River, which is part of the Colorado River System. This has adversely affected Colorado, New Mexico and Utah. 

What was the EPA doing meddling with the mine to start? In the Gold King Mine, there were “problematic concentrations of zinc, copper, cadmium, iron, lead, manganese and aluminum [that were] choking off the Upper Animas River’s ecosystem” according to the Colorado-based Durango Herald. Now, the EPA can rest easy knowing there’s another “problematic” situation in need of solving.

What was it that President Obama used to say about Republicans again? That they want “dirtier air” and “dirtier water”? Last I checked, “wanting” is better than “actively causing.”

This disaster has serious ramifications for the businesses, underwater ecosystem and communities living near the Animas River that now have to deal with the sad fact that yet another unaccountable, inept government agency has failed them. 

This is the same agency that arrogantly sues businesses left and right, receiving over “$1.5 billion in criminal fines and restitution” and over “$3 billion in court-ordered environmental projects to benefit communities” in fiscal year 2013, according to the National Review, for environmental incidents that many times paled in comparison to the havoc they’ve wreaked. This is the same agency that, four years ago, threatened to fine the Gold King Mine’s owner John Hennis $35,000 a day unless he gave the agency access to his mine. 

However, unlike a business, no one will be fired by President Obama for such a monstrous mess. And thanks to our lapdog mainstream media, no one will even ask the president why he does nothing.

This isn’t the only incident of severe government negligence and incompetence. Other “protectors” also commit egregious mistakes that have ruined lives and led to many preventable deaths. Take the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Nobly fighting for consumer protection—and having some past success at keeping bad, harmful products off the market—the FDA has also been at the center of awful decisions and an excruciatingly drawn-out process that have severely hurt many Americans. 

When new, revolutionary drugs are created, they have to go through an extensive, arduous clinical trial period in order to be approved for general use—on average 10 years. Most of the time, they’re flatly rejected.  

But even the one in 10 drugs that are approved  still have to face testing phase after agonizing testing phase, delay after brutal delay, regulation after burdensome regulation and many years of being in bureaucratic limbo to finally get to the people who sorely need them. 

One of those drugs was the beta-blocker, which protects the heart from secondary heart attacks. In the mid-1970s, it was put on an approval moratorium by the FDA after concerns with the drug arose during one of its testing phases, even though the drug was already in wide use in Europe. George Mason University economist Walter Williams writes that “finally, in 1981, [the] FDA approved the first such drug, boasting that it might save up to 17,000 lives per year. That meant as many as 100,000 people might have died from secondary heart attacks waiting for FDA approval.”

Another drug—interleukin-2, which is used to treat advanced kidney cancer, took more than 3 years to approve, according to Williams. “By the time the FDA approved the drug” he writes. “It was available in nine European countries.” Sam Kazman, who wrote “Drug Approvals and Delays” and whose work Dr. Williams cites, estimates that the delays of interleukin-2 approval contributed to 3,000 premature deaths.

There are more tragic FDA stories like these, and even more federal government mess-ups that no one wants to talk about.

Perhaps the most egregious and unjustifiable story again involves the execrable EPA and the insecticide DDT. 

In the mid-20th century, after DDT was created by Swiss chemist Paul Muller in the late 1930s and the American military began spraying it in World War II war zones to prevent malaria and typhus, the use of the insecticide proliferated around the world. And the results were astounding. 

By 1965, the National Academy of Sciences proclaimed that “in a little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million deaths that would otherwise have been inevitable.”

But in 1972, with an America still fixated on Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring which propounded the idea that there would be severe, catastrophic environmental degradation because of pesticides, the EPA chose to ban DDT. This occurred even after multiple hearings and the EPA’s own administrative judge confirmed DDT’s safety. This, in turn, precipitated a massive scaling back of DDT use around the world through the United Nations.

Liberal environmentalists still celebrate this ban as a huge victory for “environmental justice.” Yet sadly, the ideological rigidity of liberals and the US government agencies like the EPA in which many of them work—which prompted the rise of the global anti-DDT movement—has resulted in calamity for millions of lives around the world.

Over half a million people die each year from malaria and many more become infected. The most vulnerable are children under the age of five. There’s tragedy all around the world. With such awful results, how do liberals get away with advocating for increasing the power of the federal government nowadays? 

In a report by the Hill, President Obama’s EPA single-handedly reinterpreted what constitutes creeks, ponds and wetlands in the Clean Water Act in order to expand the government’s reach into commerce, desperately trying to blow the tires out of already-struggling small businesses. Obama’s EPA is also lawlessly, illegally writing its own laws like the Clean Power Plan, which seeks to pound even more regulations on energy companies, which will skyrocket electricity bills, wreaking havoc on people—especially the poor —yet again.

And we’re supposed to buy this “protection” scam from  federal government with such an abysmal track record? 

The EPA, FDA and other federal agencies need to be fundamentally restructured or delinked from the federal government, giving individual states the power to choose what to regulate and to what extent. And in general, Americans need to start waking up to the fact that the hundreds of thousands of pages of regulations on the books aren’t there to protect us. They’re there to justify the existence of these agencies and their employees. They’re there to bully people into complying with nosey, big government interventionism which stands in the way of making all our lives better. 

Let’s not kid ourselves—government is embarrassingly, and sometimes dangerously incompetent. Instead of empowering government, let’s try empowering people for a change.