On Tuesday, Senators Susan Collins (R-ME) and Claire McCaskill (D-MO) introduced the Bipartisan Jobs Creation Act, legislation that offers a number of proposals for jump-starting the economy. The bill includes two provisions that would hobble the regulatory system without generating the new jobs that the Senators seek. If these provisions were enacted, the bill would block regulatory safeguards that protect all Americans and our environment. The bill’s regulatory provisions would make it harder for the EPA and other regulatory agencies to implement congressional legislation designed to clean up our air and water, make our food safer, and reduce avoidable workplace hazards.
The regulatory provisions in the Collins-McCaskill bill are a nod to Republicans’ specious claim that “excessive regulation” is holding back job growth. One provision would delay EPA’s rule limiting hazardous air pollutants from commercial and industrial boilers by 15 months, and prevent the agency from issuing regulations that are as strong as the Clean Air Act currently requires. This regulation is already more than a decade overdue, and, once implemented, would prevent thousands of premature deaths and non-fatal heart attacks every year. They didn’t call it the “more mercury pollution bill”, but that’s what it effectively is.
The other deregulatory provision—based on the CURB Act, a bill introduced earlier this year by Sen. Collins—would add several new procedural requirements to the regulatory process, which would effectively block or delay critical safeguards. The bill would require agencies to conduct detailed cost-benefit analyses—including the impossible requirement of measuring "indirect effects"—before it could issue new rules. Most environmental, health and safety statutes rightly require protecting the public to levels that make these analyses irrelevant under the law, and would serve only to delay regulations while agencies completed the required analysis. Another requirement would require agencies to conduct lengthy analyses before issuing “guidance documents.” These documents can come in several forms, and regulated industry often welcomes them, because they help reduce regulatory uncertainty. Delaying or blocking these documents will only waste limited government resources, and make it harder for industry to comply with regulations.
Full textRepublicans in the House have spent much of the fall trying to blame regulation for the nation’s slow economic recovery. The fact that there is no reasonable evidence to back up this claim is apparently not a concern for the regulatory opponents. Moreover, regulatory opponents skip entirely over the impacts of the failure to regulate, pretending that while regulation imposes costs on the economy, the failure to regulate does not.
Now, there is even more evidence of that regulation cannot be blamed for our current economic woes. The head of the Congressional Budget Office has testified that regulation is not a drag on the economy. And we have learned from a terrific AP report that the same business firms that have told Congress that proposed environmental regulations are a serious problem have told the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)—the federal regulatory body that regulates the stock market and protects investors from corporate abuses—that the impact is unknown or will not be significant.
The campaign against regulation is built on pillars of sand. Regulatory critics claim that regulation has a price tag of more than a trillion dollars, but the study used to back up this claim has been thoroughly discredited by the Congressional Research Service, among others. They also call regulation a job-killer, but existing studies (see pp. 15-17) find regulation has either no overall impact on jobs, or, in some cases, it actually increases employment. Regulatory opponents also claim regulatory uncertainty is holding back the economy, preventing the United States from emerging from the current recession, but the Treasury Department, among others, has rebutted this claim.
Full textRep. John Dingell (D-Michigan) once remarked, “I’ll let you write the substance … you let me write the procedure, and I’ll screw you every time.” Legislation introduced yesterday in the Senate by Sens. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), and Susan Collins (R-Maine) and in the House by Reps. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and Collin Peterson (D-Minnesota) to amend the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) proves Rep. Dingell knew what he was talking about. The APA is the law that governs the way the various agencies of the federal government do their regulatory business – requiring them to operate in the sunlight and to solicit and weigh public comment about proposed regulations, and establishing a framework for judicial review of regulations. The new bill makes more than 30 pages worth of changes to the current APA, which is now about 45 pages long (not counting its Freedom of Information Act provisions), so this is no modest set of amendments.
In fact, the bill is a Christmas tree filled with nearly every shiny proposal that corporate opponents of regulation and their political allies could have ever wished for. It’s designed to hobble regulatory agencies; gum up the regulatory process; produce weaker safeguards for health, safety, the environment and more; and to make sure that landmark laws like the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and others are meekly enforced. Its proponents cloak it in rhetoric about giving a jumpstart to the economy, but it would do nothing of the sort.
Rulemaking is already an achingly slow process; this bill would slow it down even further. Right now, significant rules written to enforce the nation’s laws typically take somewhere between three and eight years to complete. During this time, interested parties have ample opportunity to weigh in with evidence and arguments.
Full textHouse Republicans have promised this week that upon their return to Washington after the recess they will attempt to stop 10 important proposed regulations because they are “job-destroying.” Adhering to the belief that “if you say it often enough, people will believe its true,” the party continues to insist that regulations cost jobs. But, as I discussed in a recent post, the evidence shows that regulation is not a drag on employment because it stimulates the creation of as many new jobs as are lost, and because job gains from regulation can offset job losses, leading to a net gain in employment.
But there is another problem with the Republican agenda: it ignores the benefits of regulation. A new CPR white paper on regulatory benefits indicates why the Republican deregulatory agenda won’t help with jobs and is a bad deal for Americans.
Government regulation has greatly benefited the American public, while the failure to regulate has cost us dearly. This reality is easily missed because no single, easily digested statistic perfectly proves the point. But, when my coauthors and I assembled the available evidence, we found that regulation has produced substantial and important benefits for the public without sacrificing jobs at the same time. There is simply no reason to suppose the regulations on the Republicans’ hit list will produce any different result.
This CPR white paper, Saving Lives, Preserving the Environment, Growing the Economy: The Truth About Regulation is the first of its kind to assemble the available evidence concerning the benefits of regulation. And the evidence is impressive. For example, according to OMB’s annual report on regulation to Congress, regulatory benefits exceed regulatory costs by 7 to 1 for significant regulations. Even these estimates don’t capture the full advantages of regulations; some benefits, such as reducing toxic mercury pollution, are difficult to monetize, and aren’t even counted. The advance estimates of benefits from agencies have historically proven lower than the benefits in reality. The payoff for environmental regulations is even greater. EPA estimates the regulatory benefit of the Clean Air Act exceeds its costs by a ratio of 25 to 1. Similarly, a study of EPA rules issued during the Obama Administration found that their regulatory benefits exceeded costs by a ratio as high as 22 to 1. Nevertheless, 8 of the 10 regulations House Minority Leader Eric Cantor put on his hit list are proposed EPA regulations.
Full textThe current anti-regulatory mantra of Republican legislators (e.g., Cantor, Boehner, Issa) and conservative think tanks (e.g., CEI and Heritage) is that regulation is a “job-killer.” And a top plank of Republicans’ job agenda when they return from the summer recess is to limit regulations. There is just one problem with this rhetoric. It is not backed up by the data, including the latest Department of Labor study on the reasons why employers lay off workers.
Economic studies indicate that regulation is not a drag on employment and may actually increase the number of jobs. Bezdek, Wendling and Di Perna found that “EP [environmental protection], economic growth, and jobs creation are complementary and compatible: Investments in EP create jobs and displace jobs, but the net effect on employment is positive.” (Quoted here, p. 15). Likewise, when Richard Morgenstern and his colleagues studied the impact of EPA regulation in four large polluting industries, they found that there was an increase in jobs in two industries (petroleum and plastics) and no statistically measurable impact on jobs in the other two industries (pulp and paper and steel). Consider too that Stephen Meyer compared the economic performance of states with strong environmental regulation to states with weaker regulations after the 1990-1991 recession. He found that “[e]nvironmentally stronger states [did] not experience more precipitous declines in employment during the recession. Nor do they demonstrate a higher rate of business failure.”
A little-noticed report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released on August 10 throws more cold water on the claim regulation kills off jobs. The BLS data examines the reasons companies give for laying off workers when the layoffs involve 50 or more workers who are laid off for more than 30 days (“extended mass layoffs”). The BLS data says that in the second quarter of 2011, 261,346 workers were laid off in such events. Of those, 690 of the separations were attributed by the employers to “Governmental regulations / intervention.” That’s .26% of the separations.
Full textThe National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has a Friday deadline to respond to a subpoena issued by House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.). The subpoena seeks "[a]ll documents and communications relating to the [NLRB's] Office of General Counsel's investigation of Boeing..." prior to the time the NLRB issued its complaint against the company. The NLRB has alleged the company created a second assembly line at a nonunion plant in South Carolina to build its 787 Dreamliner in order to retaliate against union workers on Puget Sound, who had a history of conducting lawful strikes.
No one can deny that the House has a legitimate interest in conducting oversight of the Board. At the same time, House ethics rules (House Ethics Manual, p. 303) and a Fifth Circuit decision (Pillsbury Co. v. FTC) prohibit congressional oversight committees from improperly trying to influence the outcome of a case when it is pending before an agency. In Pillsbury, the FTC Commissioners were subject to a “barrage” of hostile questions and statements criticizing the FTC’s position concerning a legal issue relevant to the outcome of the pending case. This conduct violated the due process rights of the side the legislators opposed – in this case the union representing Boeing’s employees.
Representative Issa is hounding the NLRB’s General Counsel, not the members of the Board. Nevertheless, Representative Issa has threatened to abolish the NLRB, and the subpoena constitutes an unprecedented intrusion into an agency’s enforcement efforts. The NLRB has not been the subject of a congressional subpoena since 1940. As a group of 34 labor law professors noted in a letter to Representative Issa, the document request plus the threat “may well cross the line delineated by the courts in the Pillsbury and subsequent cases.” After all, members of the NLRB can scarcely ignore the ferocity of the Committee’s efforts to ensure a decision in favor of Boeing.
Full textOn Wednesday, former senator Evan Bayh joined former George W. Bush Chief of Staff Andy Card at the Chamber of Commerce to formally announce their plans to tour around the country campaigning against regulations. The pair have already jumped into a series of falsehoods, endorsing, for example, the discredited SBA-sponsored study claiming regulations cost $1.75 Trillion in a year.
Over at ThinkProgress, CPR Member Scholar Sidney Shapiro takes a closer look at the pair's claims:
Bayh and Card see regulators as having “unprecedented power” and call for “restoring balance and accountability in the process.” I don’t know what regulatory system they are viewing, but it bears no resemblance to the one operating currently in the United States. Far from having “unprecedented power,” agencies find it difficult to complete any type of controversial regulation in less than six to ten years because they must negotiate a complex gauntlet of analysis and reviews before they can issue a regulation, including judicial review at the end of the road.
See more in Evan Bayh Shills For Chamber’s Anti-Regulation Campaign With A Series of False Claims.
Full textFact: It often takes agencies up to 10 years (in some cases even longer) to develop and issue critical regulations needed to protect people and the environment. These delays may save corporations money, but they impose real and preventable costs in terms of lives lost, money wasted, and ecosystems destroyed.
The reasons for this delay are not hard to divine. Before it can issue a rule, agencies must run a highly complex gauntlet of analyses and reviews that have piled up thanks to several decades’ worth of misguided regulatory legislation, executive orders, and OMB memos, letters, and circulars. The result is a mishmash of unnecessary or duplicative analyses and reviews that do little to improve the quality of agency decision-making.
For their part, agencies are hardly in the position to play these games. Over the last few decades, agencies have become overstretched as their budgets and staff have been held constant or even shrank, while the number of imported toys, new chemicals, and job hazards has increased. The result has been a series of catastrophic regulatory failures, such as the BP oil spill, salmonella outbreaks, and the Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster.
Under these circumstances, the image of agencies running amok and overregulating that is often invoked by industry and sympathetic members of Congress is absurd.
Nevertheless, this is the premise behind four proposals that will get an airing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which will conduct a hearing tomorrow to consider four plans would weaken public health and safety protections. The proposals from Senators Snowe, Roberts, Vitter, and Warner (all of whom will testify) all share one thing in common: they would delay critical safeguards even more without improving the benefits of current or future regulations.
Full textThe Obama administration has been busy with its regulatory look-back, which required agencies to identify health, safety, and environmental standards to be reviewed in the coming months, with the possibility of eliminating or modifying them (in some cases, the specific proposal for modification or elimination was already made last week). In explaining why the look-back is necessary, the administration sounds too much like the Chamber of Commerce or other anti-regulatory critics and not enough like candidate Obama, who once unapologetically asserted that “government should do that which we cannot do for ourselves.” Cass Sunstein, administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), should adjust the tone when he testifies before a subpanel of the House Energy and Commerce Committee tomorrow. Instead of deploying another batch of anti-regulatory rhetoric, the administration should use more language that reminds the public of the value of regulation at the same time it defends its look-back process.
The administration apparently has felt compelled to be a rhetorical opponent of the very government it heads because of what it, or its pollsters, perceive about the national mood. Yet, this point in time presents what we in the teaching profession like to call a “teachable moment.” Even if the administration thought politics dictated a look-back, it could have done it without taking up the industry rhetoric of rules that are "just plain dumb"—or acting as if the agencies could do a look-back without any effects on their resources for existing health and safety protection work.
One particular way the Obama administration has fallen short is its failure to criticize the claim by regulatory opponents that regulations have an annual cost of $1.75 trillion dollars.
Full textCongress charged the Office of Advocacy of the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) with the job of representing the interests of small business before regulatory agencies, such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). As an agency of the federal government, it has an obligation to taxpayers to get its facts straight before it speaks. Lately, it has ignored this basic obligation, most notably sponsoring a study that used flawed methodology to claim that regulations impose $1.75 trillion in costs every year.
Now, Dr. Winslow Sargeant, Chief Counsel for Advocacy at the SBA, has upped his attack on OSHA’s efforts to update its noise regulation, making assertions that are highly misleading and at times simply wrong. In an interview last week with the Phoenix Business Journal, Sargeant claimed:
The OSHA rule was a solution to a problem that had already been solved. Basically, this was a noise abatement rule. At some factories, there's noise. The machine makes noise. There's already a solution -- ear plugs, earmuffs that workers would wear. That solved the problem. OSHA came along and said, well, that may solve the problem. But we think companies should buy new equipment with lower noise figures. So now we've gone from a solution of $10 or so to millions of dollars to solve the same problem.
Dr. Sargeant, a presidential appointee, is not arguing that he thinks reducing machine noise isn't worth the cost; he's actually asserting that there is no safety difference whatsoever between using ear plugs and reducing equipment noise. That's not true.
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