The Environmental Protection Agency, which has sometimes been on the side of angels in the policies it has promulgated, was more nearly a friend of fanaticism when, in 1997, it established new, unbelievably tough standards for ozone and particulates. Its studies were sloppy, its health claims were wildly exaggerated, the costs would be enormous - and there was fresh reason to wonder whether this agency on a mission was also an agency out of control.
Now, thanks to that show of bureaucratic arrogance, the Supreme Court is considering whether to curb the agency's powers. The justices will review a lower court ruling that the EPA had interpreted the Clean Air Act so broadly as to give itself an authority restricted by the Constitution to Congress. According to the lower court, the EPA seemed to observe no clear barriers to what the act's language allowed it to do and ''failed to state intelligibly'' the justification for the 1997 standards, which would cost at least $46 billion to implement.
In part, the lower court was saying that the EPA's new dictates did not appear to be scientifically warranted. The agency swore its tougher rules would prevent thousands of premature deaths and provide relief from respiratory ailments, but scientists outside the agency wondered whether the new rules would have even a negligible impact on health. The EPA's studies, an economist noted in an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, ''failed to control for temperature, humidity, other pollutants and other significant confounding factors, which even had the preposterous effect of attributing changes in the number of homicides to fine particulates in the air.''
Responding to a cross appeal by business groups, the Supreme Court has said it will consider whether the EPA should do cost-benefit analyses in deciding on such regulations, and there have been predictable moans and groans to the effect that this would amount to giving dollars precedence over human lives. But miscalculated regulations have a health cost, too - for instance, it has been noted, by causing layoffs in additionally encumbered businesses, leading to less health care for families that no longer have health insurance. An article in Regulation magazine points to a Harvard study showing that more cost-effective regulatory programs in the federal government actually could save lives - as many as 60,000 a year.
Surely, the Supreme Court will not let the EPA do whatever it wants, no matter how blistering the cost or how undetectable the supposed benefit. Even an agency that in many ways has been a national benefactor should not be permitted to slip the constitutional harness in pursuit of an environmental utopia that could exist only if any number of other life-enhancing values were scuttled.