Why the EPA Fighting Back Matters

The EPA has a marketing problem and it’s a basic one that has existed for decades. Despite being largely effective in its mission to protect American air quality and prevent toxic sludge from entering waterways, the government agency receives almost no public credit for their success. Of course, I’m oversimplifying their mission and perhaps overstating their success—but when you compare America to many other nations outside Europe, it’s clear that the moves the US government made decades ago to protect national parks and create environmental regulations have worked.

This is important context for the moment we find ourselves in right now where Elon Musk’s DOGE group has instituted a widespread rollback of the EPA’s ability to protect the environment or enforce their policies. EPA workers are protesting now and trying to share their story in any way they can to make people listen. The bigger picture here is one that affects many other government agencies with missions to protect American citizens and consumers too. All of them have failed to share their successes with the public in a way that matters and now that they are being dismantled there is no public outcry of support to keep them.

More Americans complained about McDonald’s retiring the McRib sandwich. Is that a bigger deal than keeping pollution out of the air? Of course not, but it does have better marketing. It would be nice to find a policy solution to protect the government agencies that are meant to protect us. Even better, though, would be to find a marketing and PR solution. Given how many of my readers of this newsletter are marketing and PR professionals, I’m writing this as a message to you (and to myself). What can we do to tell this story so more of America understands why these groups matter?