Is the Environmental Assessment process a huge cop-out?

We pay, through our tax dollars, for agencies like the EPA to protect and monitor the environment. Assumably this means that they have spent the money (pre assessment era) to collect information on the environment. Now they have started a process which makes industry responsible for providing a "drawn conclusion" for the agency to vote yes or no on. Aren't we paying the agency itself to do this work and assess the environment? Why aren't government agencies providing the basis for drawing a conclusion instead of asking a biased third party to provide the information? Better yet, are their salaries justified for simply reading a report (Environmental Impact Assessment) and saying yes or no? I thought we paid them to be experts.. . .

All goverment agencies are notorious for wasting all their money. Now they can't afford to do that anymore. Too many of their employees have to support their vices. Besides, those agencies only report some of what they find. The part that furthers their interests. They suppress much needed information all the time and waste our money while doing it. There are definitely things we need to do, but all the planets in the known universe experienc global warming or something very simlar just because of elliptacal orbits and so on and so forth. They make a big deal out of things that aren't really that big of a deal. Our air that we breathe is definitely a problem, but icecaps will melt with or without us.