Surely the larger point must be that whenever a committee decides to table concerns about garbage in order to save money this month, they are engaging in self-delusion. Someone, some day soon, will HAVE to spend the money eventually to clean up that garbage. The knee-jerk desire to push that cost onto some future committee must surely be regarded as a spectacular failure of misaligned incentives.
That's in essence what we do when we relax environmental regulations. You don't save any money, you just defer the costs.
Isn't it astonishing how, even though we're faced with actual REAL evidence every day, we continue the self-delusion every chance we can. And a priori, you would think that the fact of this reality would be most obvious to those whom we would consider "conservative", in the sense they view themselves as realists. Instead we have evolved political alignments based on whether or not a policy results in "corporate" costs/benefits, as if those considerations are primary. It's understandable for people to think selfishly, it's not understandable that we let them.