Over the weekend, the Associated Press ran a story on the results of its enterprising investigation into the toxic content of children’s jewelry imported from China. Pressed to abandon the use of toxic lead in toys and jewelry, manufacturers have apparently begun using an even more dangerous metal, cadmium, which can cause neurological damage – brain damage – to children and give them cancer. AP tested 103 pieces of jewelry bought in American stores within the last few months, and found that 12 percent contained at least 10 percent cadmium. One item, a cute little Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer trinket, was 91 percent cadmium.
Addressing the question that leaps to mind – How did these extraordinarily dangerous trinkets get onto store shelves in the first place? – reporter Justin Pritchard writes these utterly terrifying and completely truthful words:
A patchwork of federal consumer protection regulations does nothing to keep these nuggets of cadmium from U.S. store shelves. If the products were painted toys, they would face a recall. If they were industrial garbage, they could qualify as hazardous waste. But since there are no cadmium restrictions on jewelry, such items are sold legally.
Of course, this is just the latest in a series of startling tales of dangerous products making it to market in the United States – poisoned peanut butter, toxic drywall, lead-painted toys, and more. Not to put too fine a point on it, but such products often kill people – sometimes immediately, from acute exposure to toxins, and sometimes over a longer period of time by way of cancer. If folks are lucky, their lives simply become miserable, with headaches, nausea, respiratory and heart problems a daily occurrence.
Full textEPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced Monday that the agency will propose new rules to reduce pollution from runoff from urban and suburban areas and from concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). This announcement goes far in demonstrating that the EPA under President Obama is serious about its commitments to improve the quality of the nation’s waters, especially those waters that continue to be plagued by pollution from nonpoint and other unregulated sources.
The new rules would apply nationwide, but Administrator Jackson noted that more stringent requirements may apply to the states of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed and the District of Columbia as part of the new federal efforts to restore the Bay. The proposed rules would expand stormwater regulations to rapidly urbanizing areas and would apply regulations to existing, large impervious surfaces like parking lots. In addition, the proposed rules would designate more animal feeding operations as CAFOs and subject them to permitting requirements. The EPA would also expand regulations for manure management for off-site uses of manure.
While new regulations are needed to cover existing gaps, the EPA should also use all of its existing authority to take action and be wary of the potential delay caused by new rulemaking. The rules are not expected to be finalized until 2012 for stormwater and 2013 for CAFOs.
Full textCPRBlog asked some of our regular bloggers to give us some suggestions for the high and low points of the regulatory year. We began by taking the Bush Administration’s “midnight regulations” off the table, so that we could focus in on the Obama Administration’s impact to date. CPR President Rena Steinzor begins.
The high point of the year on the regulatory front was EPA’s endangerment finding on climate change, issued December 7, 2009, finally giving the seventh day of December a positive symbolic role in history, beyond the more memorable one as a day that will “live in infamy.” We endured eight solid years of stonewalling by the Bush Administration on climate change – a saga that included everything from suppressing EPA reports because the facts were inconvenient, to the downright juvenile step of refusing to open an email from EPA because it contained a finding that climate change pollutants must be controlled. Now, finally, the adults are back in charge.
Full textDear Cass:
As you know, we picked a spat with the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) last week over Randy Lutter’s supposedly temporary detail appointment to your office. It’s not the first time we’ve criticized the workings of OIRA, and almost certainly won’t be the last.
I’ve spoken to a number of people in the media and elsewhere who have expressed surprise that progressive organizations like CPR are such relentless critics of a progressive Administration. I’m sure Administration officials feel this frustration as well. That dynamic is at work in OIRA’s case because you have a reputation as a progressive thinker on many issues.
I won’t try to speak for all progressives, but I can assure you that very few of us criticize the Administration lightly. Nor do we do it with any sense of pleasure. The Obama Administration inherited an absolute mess on every front and progressives are well aware of the herculean effort you are making to dig out. But while it is tempting to take refuge in the notion that if only a few things are better at the end of however many terms the voters give President Obama, that limited vision is not why you signed up to serve, nor is it why so many of us voted for your man.
Full textAs reporters dug deeper on our post yesterday about the return of Randy Lutter, chief economist at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under the George W. Bush Administration, to “regulatory czar” Cass Sunstein’s office, OMB spokesman Tom Gavin worked to downplay the significance of Lutter’s reappearance. Gavin confirmed that Lutter was in fact ensconced in OIRA, as reported by Inside EPA this morning, but said he was merely “on detail” from the FDA as a career civil servant who would report up the chain of command to Sunstein. The implication, of course, is that Lutter would have little influence on policy.
How heartwarming that argument must have been for civil servants at OIRA and elsewhere. As my colleague Sid Shapiro and I argue in a forthcoming book (The People's Agents and the Battle to Protect the American Public, arriving in spring), civil servants are the backbone and future hope of good government. Precisely because they play such an important role, their policy positions from past lives deserve scrutiny. And Randy Lutter is not a typical civil servant. Rather, he rose through the ranks both at OIRA and within FDA, while advancing the most rigid iterations of cost-benefit analysis. In fact, he is so widely known that word of his return to OIRA was spread to outside advocates like me by agitated civil servants, who see his return as further evidence that that OIRA is going to continue business as usual from Bush II.
In addition to downgrading the value of a lead-poisoned child’s IQ point to $1,500 because we should not transfer “wealth” from parents to children by asking parents to pay for their poisoned kids’ medical treatment, Randy Lutter has argued, in a seminal paper written for the American Enterprise Institute with his right-wing colleagues Kip Viscusi and Robert Hahn, that stringent health and safety regulations make people worse off because they make electricity, health care, and other life essentials more expensive. Lost from these elaborate calculations is any recognition that when people get sick from pollution, their care and their diminished quality of life are worth a lot of money, not to mention the important consideration that such protections are required by statutes passed by Congress and are not up for the reconsideration Lutter and his colleagues strongly urge.
Full textFor a number of days now, we’ve been hearing rumors that Cass Sunstein, President Obama’s “regulatory czar,” was on the verge of hiring conservative economist Randall Lutter to join him at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). Few personnel developments could be more discouraging to those hopeful that the Obama Administration will fulfill its many commitments to revitalize the agencies responsible for protecting public health, worker safety, and natural resources.
The best thing that can be said about the prospect of hiring Randall Lutter, a Cornell-educated economist who cut his teeth at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), is that he is a straightforward traditionalist. No “soft” or “humane” cost-benefit analysis for him, he likes his de-regulatory policy nice and raw. Lutter was the senior economist at the benighted Food and Drug Administration during the George W. Bush Administration, and now he brings his anti-regulatory toolbox to the epicenter of cost-benefit analysis, OIRA.
Ironically, the most glaring example in a long list of Lutter publications goes after one of the President’s most important, and often stated, regulatory priorities: safeguarding children, especially children of color, from the lurking dangers of toxic pollution, poor health care, and the grinding burden of poverty.
Full textOn Monday, OMB Director Peter Orszag sent a letter to Rep. Ed Markey, responding to Congressman Markey’s concerns about OMB’s involvement in EPA’s Endocrine Disruptor Screening Program. Orszag’s letter -- released by Markey's office Wednesday -- explains, in no uncertain terms, that OMB is done meddling in EPA’s scientific determinations about endocrine-disrupting chemicals. It’s a step in the right direction for Orszag and OIRA Administrator Cass Sunstein, who have their work cut out for them if they are going to -- I hope -- work to halt OMB’s historical penchant for interfering in EPA’s work.
Congressman Markey’s concerns about OMB involvement in the EDSP were stoked by the same events that prompted the letter that CPR Board Member Robert Glicksman and I sent to Mr. Sunstein and his colleague Dr. John Holdren of the OSTP. We saw a trail of documents suggesting that OMB was pressuring EPA to revise the procedures through which it would allow pesticide manufacturers to avoid EPA orders to test their products for potential endocrine-disrupting effects. (See CPR Policy Analyst Matthew Shudtz’s October 20 post for details.)
In his letter to Rep. Markey, Mr. Orszag wisely avoided delving into the scientific underpinnings of the EDSP. And in testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection on Tuesday, EPA’s Steve Owens testified that, after numerous conversations with Mr. Sunstein, it is his understanding that OMB’s terms of clearance for the EDSP Paperwork Reduction Act Information Collection Request “in no way” limits EPA’s discretion under the program.
OMB’s course correction on this issue is great news for scientific integrity. Unfortunately, it cannot undo the mistakes of the past – in particular, the Bush-era changes to the EDSP that opened the floodgates for industry to claim that their old test data are adequate to replace a full battery of new tests that EPA would prefer that they undertake. EPA’s procedures for dealing with “Other Scientifically Relevant Information” aren’t perfect, but the past is behind us, and the future is looking up.
Full textBefore Cass Sunstein had spent much more than a week as the official director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), he invited us over to the White House to talk about how he wanted to shape his small office of economists and statisticians into a strong force for progressive policy within the White House. Followers of the Center for Progressive Reform know that we put out a report in the run-up to his confirmation that was critical of his views on cost-benefit analysis. So I give him credit for opening the door to us, and so soon after his confirmation at that.
It was a good meeting, and we pledged to keep in touch as he undertakes what I hope will be a re-education that will convert his staff from the Bush mode – serving as a sort of waiting room for disgruntled industries – to what we hope will be the Obama mode – serving as a group of visionary economists that identifies the toughest problems holding back desperately needed protections for workers, the public, and the environment, and then moving to make sure the regulatory structure does something about them.
An obscure set of documents posted just last week on the EPA website illustrates the point, demonstrating that in the period before Sunstein’s confirmation OIRA staff were continuing business as usual, acting as if President George W. Bush were still president.
Full textAfter weeks of sustained attack from the right-wing on issues that are marginal to the job the President asked him to do, Cass Sunstein has emerged from the nomination process bloody but apparently unbowed (here's this afternoon's roll call). He is now the nation’s “regulatory czar,” Director of the White House OMB Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Although Professor Sunstein has been sitting in the Old Executive Office Building for months, he has undoubtedly been preoccupied with his nomination battle. Having survived the occasionally nonsensical trial by partisan and self-serving flight of fancy that was his confirmations process, we hope he will notice that his staff at OIRA has been behaving as if the 2008 election never happened. Having paid careful attention to OIRA over these past few months, in search of evidence of a new outlook, I’m sorry to report that I’ve drawn the strong impression that Bush Administration culture and ideology remain unchanged at OIRA. To deliver change we can believe in, Cass Sunstein needs to convert OIRA from industry waiting room to objective arbiter of inter-agency disputes.
My impression that change has not yet arrived is based in great measure on a chart compiled and released today by the Center for Progressive Reform, showing that in recent months, OMB met nine times with outsiders to discuss health and safety regulations, and that eight of those meetings were dominated by industry representatives complaining about proposals under development at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the National Highway Traffics Safety Administration (NHTSA). For example, tire manufacturers met to discuss NHTSA’s proposals on inflating tires to increase fuel efficiency. The oil industry met to discuss EPA’s rule on the reporting of greenhouse gas emissions. And the airline industry met to discuss EPA’s rule on water discharges from airport de-icing operations. Public interest groups have met with OIRA on only one regulatory matter: amendments to an EPA rule on renewable fuels. That meeting was one in a set of four, with the other three devoted to the views of the American Petroleum Institute, the biodiesel industry, and Shell Oil.
Those of us worried sick over climate change confronted a depressing piece of excellent reporting in Monday's Washington Post. Environment reporter David Fahrenthold wrote that environmental organizations are getting their proverbial clocks cleaned by a well-organized and pervasive campaign mounted by affected industries in small and mid-size communities throughout America. “It seems that environmentalists are struggling in a fight they have spent years setting up,” Fahrenthold wrote. “Even now, these groups differ on whether to scare the public with predictions of heat waves or woo it with promises of green jobs.”
If scaring the public is the objective, environmentalists don’t have to look very far for hard facts to support the effort. All they really need to do is focus on what the world’s most prominent and reputable scientists keep trying to tell us about the dismal state of the environment that we’re preparing to hand over to our children—not in 100 but in 30 or 40 years—if we don’t control our energy consumption. Spend an hour perusing the various reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a remarkable consortium of thousands of the world’s leading experts in all of the relevant scientific disciplines, and the scope and severity of the problem will be abundantly clear. It’s even more troubling when one considers that the IPCC is an international group that operates by consensus, and still manages to frame warnings that will turn your hair white.
So what’s the dilemma for environmentalists? Why don’t they simply recite the facts, reminding Americans of the great damage caused by unregulated pollution and the important benefits of cleaning it up? It’s a strategy that has worked on a number of environmental issues in the past, even in the face of brutally misleading industry campaigns along the lines of the one we’re now witnessing. Why, when even John McCain ostensibly agrees with them on this issue, have so many decided they need to convert climate change into an economic development issue?
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