“Cutting the EPA would hurt small government contractors.”

This is true, these are not subsidies though, these are contracts for services, the EPA doesn't really do things themselves, the EPA does not have and should not have the people and equipment to clean up this or that, having all that shit and all those government workers would cost way more than the government hiring contractors through a competitive bidding process.

The business of every agency is to distribute funds, first and foremost. For what and in what manner is secondary.

All bureaucrats have the same job, to spend their entire budget every year and to ask for more, the only way they fail in their job is if they get level funding or save money. Of course this leads to unsustainable growth of bureaucracy, I learned this in a Public Administration class on the first day. The only other person I have ever seen accurately describe this problem is Donald Trump.

Indeed many regulations serve different purposes, they provide things like safety and at the same time they are protectionist. Say that someone wants to be in the business of handling dangerous chemicals, so they will have to follow certain regulations, perhaps they need to buy gas masks for their employees. Well then not just anyone can be in that business, competition is limited to those companies who can buy gas masks for their employees and comply with all the regulations. So regulations do limit competition but also provide various benefits. What we need to do is identify regulations that don't serve any other purpose besides protecting entrenched businesses.

A lot of what the EPA does is not cleaning things up, mostly they sue corporations who have polluted. And they get sued a lot.

Many of the environmental statutes that govern EPA actions contain provisions that allow citizens to sue EPA when EPA fails to perform an act or duty required by the statute.