Motivating More Agency Enforcement?

Professor William Andreen's new article, Motivating Enforcement: Institutional Culture and the Clean Water Act, presents the interesting question of how to keep environmental enforcement going despite pressures from an anti-regulatory White House or Congress to refrain.  His solution is to cultivate a tough, stable enforcement culture and tradition within the EPA that will forge ahead regardless of political changes in the elected branches of the government.  I didn't find many concrete suggestions in the article about how to accomplish this goal, but he nicely explains the historical buildup of the non-enforcement problem; and I like his style of prose. 

I think this question is interesting and is certainly applicable to regulatory agencies generally (the Antitrust Division, for example, or the NLRB).  The flip side of the issue, of course, is whether non-enforcement is a problem at all, or if instead it's the only thing that earns administrative agencies a legitimate place in a democracy - the citizenry can always keep overzealous, tunnel-visioned bureaucrats in check by electing a President who will tighten the leash, or a Congress that will pull the plug.  Not that there are any overzealous agents at the EPA; I am speaking hypothetically. In other words, one could argue that non-enforcement is the Admin equivalent of jury nullification.  Positions on the non-enforcement controversy generally correlate to one's prior givens about the virtues or necessity of the regulations themselves. 

That issue aside (which is hard to ignore for more than a moment), Andreen's article does pose an interesting question, to which I've found no truly satisfactory answer: how to motivate enforcement officials to be productive, without giving them a vested interest or perverse incentive that would taint their prosecutorial decisions.  Civil servants usually earn less than their private-sector counterparts (one of the reasons I find the "privatization-will-save-us-money" refrain to be mystifying), and have fewer office supplies available in the stock room, but supposedly this is offset by the less-tangible perks of job security, more reasonable work hours, and (?) the warm glow one feels from doing the right thing.  So much for retention - in this context, how does one motivate them to hunt down violators as fast as possible?  A related question that Andreen does not ask, but certainly implies, is how to prioritize the agent's duty to the Chief Executive (or the Congressional Committee) vs. duty to the statute itself - especially when the two seem to be in conflict.  How can one choose the latter without encountering a separation of powers problem?  I haven't figured out a workable solution, I confess.

-Dru Stevenson