An analysis of U.S. federal environmental legislation in the nineteenth, twentieth and beginning twenty-first centuries, with emphasis on presidential party and political majorities in congress

ABSTRACT

U.S. federal environmental legislation has followed a significant logistic growth curve from 1862 through 2012, as determined by the cumulative number of acts per Congress. Growth of federal environmental legislation reached an asymptote around 2003; the number of environmental regulatory acts passed per year has sharply declined since 2002. Republican presidential years generally resulted in more federal environmental acts than Democratic presidential years, with the greatest total number of acts passed occurring during the eight occurrences of a Republican president and Democratic control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives. Statistically, however, the number of acts is evenly distributed among presidential political parties. The significant decline in U.S. federal environmental legislation since 2003 is presumably due to the second anti-environmental regulation backlash in the U.S. Congress that began in 1995, and an apparent, recent reversal by the Republican Party of its historically strong support of pro-environmental legislation.

KEYWORDS:

• U.S. environmental legislation
• U.S. environmental politics
• U.S. political majorities
• environmental policy
• environmental governance

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Cheryl Farkas for assistance with Internet searches and Ryan Steele for assistance in figure production.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Craig W. Steele is a Professor in the Department of Biology and Health Sciences at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on integrating multidisciplinary theoretical and practical approaches to explain underlying mechanisms and the integration of sensory modalities in the behaviour of aquatic animals, primarily with regard to developing methods in behavioural toxicology for the assessment of aquatic pollutants for application to environmental regulations.

Additional information

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article from any funding agency in the public, commercial and/or not-for-profit sectors.