This post was written by CPR President Rena Steinzor and CPR Policy Analyst James Goodwin.
Earlier today, OIRA Administrator Cass Sunstein released a new memorandum to agencies directing them to consider and account for the “cumulative” costs of their regulations. Attacking the cumulative costs of regulation has been a favored tactic among regulated industries and their allies in Congress (it's a feature in many anti-regulatory bills, such as the Regulatory Accountability Act). Rather than responding forcefully to the faulty cumulative costs premise, the Obama Administration has instead bought into it. The memo outlines principles and not specific technical prescriptions for how rules will be written, but it’s likely the agencies will follow the directions from the White House. What we’re left with is a solution in search of a problem that could further delay or derail badly needed solutions to real problems.
As with so many of the arguments offered by regulatory opponents, the cumulative burdens concept is intended to provide a one-sided view of regulations—one that focuses exclusively on the costs of regulations without any consideration of their benefits. Such a one-sided view, of course, provides no useful information about the real value of regulations. Rather, it portrays them as an inescapable drain on the economy, while ignoring how they help people by saving lives or preserving irreplaceable ecosystems for future generations.
Counting up all the costs of all the regulations that affect an industrial sector would be a time-consuming task, although what problem careful attention to the cumulative costs of regulations would solve is far from clear. Obviously, fans of this number crunching hope to to identify areas were regulatory costs can be reduced. Conceivably, heightened awareness of how all applicable regulations affect a sector could promote streamlining of the paperwork that regulated entities must submit. For example, the EPA might design a new electronic form for power plants to fill out regarding their emissions of two different air pollutants, rather than having those power plants fill out two separate electronic reports.
Full textThe toll: An estimated 6,500 to 17,967 premature deaths, 9,867 non-fatal heart attacks, 3,947 cases of chronic bronchitis, and more than 2.3 million lost work and school days. That's just a partial tally of the costs Americans will bear because of unjustified delays in two critical health and safety regulations. More broadly, the Administration’s Fall 2011 Regulatory Agenda—released late, at the end of January of 2012—shows how many of the most important rules currently in the regulatory pipeline are being similarly delayed, leaving people and the environment inadequately protected against a number of unreasonable risks, possibly for years to come.
Working from the latest regulatory agenda, a new CPR Issue Alert assesses the Obama Administration’s progress in completing 12 key regulatory actions identified in a CPR white paper issued last April. A group of CPR Member Scholars and CPR Policy Analysts warned in that paper that the Administration’s failure to bring a sense of urgency to the job of completing the rules had opened the door to the very real prospect that nine of the twelve might get caught up in the backwash of the 2012 presidential campaign, and indeed might never be completed by the current Administration.
That bleak prediction is coming true before our eyes. Progress on the great majority of these regulatory actions has been delayed further over the last 10 months, and it is now likely most of the rules will not go into effect during the current presidential term.
Full textImagine for a moment that you’rethe chief executive of a company that manufactures chemicals used in plastics that become consumer products, especially plastic picnic ware. The head of your product development lab reports that she has just gotten some troubling results regarding one of your biggest sellers—a chemical agent that makes it possible for plastic utensils to maintains their decorator colors. The study shows that this agent causes severe neurological damage in rats. The Toxic Substances Control Act, commonly referred to as T(O)SCA, requires you to turn all “health and safety” studies over to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). You tell her to do so, but order that the name of the suspect substance be replaced with a so-called “generic chemical name” that makes it impossible for anyone to understand the implications of the study. You further instruct that your company name be redacted from the information transmitted to EPA. The result is a report that neither allows the public to understand the implications of the study nor to monitor how the government and the company curb either its marketing or its use.
Any college sophomore biology student knows that scientific advances depend on the free and open sharing of information so that experiments can be replicated and hypotheses disproved. So it was that over the last several days a small group of researchers gathered in Geneva under the auspices of the World Health Organization to wring their hands about whether to make public groundbreaking research on a particularly virulent strain of the lethal bird flu. The upshot? The research will be published, despite the risk that it could be used by terrorists. The group decided that the importance of scientific openness regarding this crucial public health threat outweighed the superficially appealing notion of embracing secrecy that would chill further discoveries.
Full textThe Economist’s February 18 edition offers a cover package of five articles on “Over-regulated America” (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Our British friends want you to know there’s a problem here in the States that needs fixing:
A study for the Small Business Administration, a government body, found that regulations in general add $10,585 in costs per employee. It’s a wonder the jobless rate isn’t even higher than it is.
You can almost feel The Economist’s pain: the jobless rate should be a lot higher than it is, if the premise about the costs of regulations is correct. Surely if the regulatory burden were actually 12 percent of GDP – that’s what the SBA numbers say, if you draw them out – things would be far worse than they are. Ideologically unable to consider the obvious alternative – that regulations don’t add $10,585 in costs per employee, The Economist, just, well, “wonders” aloud.
Here’s what The Economist would have found if they’d dug just a little bit: Fully 70 percent of the SBA estimate was actually based on a regression analysis using opinion polling data on perceived regulatory climate across countries (in a strange twist, a separate article in the same issue actually questions the study, briefly). Whole reports have been written on why that number is bogus.
Our economy is still recovering from a tremendous collapse largely caused by under-regulation of financial institutions. But in its group of articles, The Economist wants us to think the opposite: “The home of laissez-faire is being suffocated by excessive and badly written regulation.” That premise, in turn, leads the magazine to – you guessed it – a series of warmed-over right-wing policy ideas aimed at gutting regulations. Let’s take a closer look.
Full textPolitical scientists have coined the term “bureaucracy bashing” to connote the temptation now rife among national politicians to beat up on the civil service for reasons that have nothing to do with reality. Ronald Reagan pioneered this art form of disrespecting bureaucrats in the name of downsizing government, even as federal deficit spending on government programs he favored grew to epic proportions. Ironically, President Obama has lifted the same hammer in an altogether unsuccessful effort to placate the conservative critics who claim the Reagan mantle. His efforts to pal around with the right-wing are unlikely to win him many friends, and risk undermining the credibility of the government he so badly wants to lead into a second term.
The most recent example of the President’s penchant for bureaucracy bashing was the State of the Union’s “spilled milk” joke, which went over like a lead balloon – even Michelle Obama did not crack a smile. Like other recent examples of President Obama’s bureaucracy bashing, this one wasn’t even true.
Consider the following episodes:
The debate over whether the government protects people exposed to industrial hazards enough—or whether it engages in ruinous “overregulation”—is only occasionally coherent. Sometimes it’s downright bizarre, and never is it for the faint of heart. Consider the case of kids working on farms. Following a series of gruesome accidents involving teenagers as young as 14 who were smothered in grain elevators or lost legs to giant augers used to shovel crops into storage silos, the Department of Labor (DOL) announced a proposal in September to tighten prohibitions on children doing such dangerous work. Existing rules have proven shockingly ineffective: the fatality rate for young agricultural workers is four times greater than for their peers in other workplaces. They were written four decades ago, before many of the machines and methods now commonplace on today’s farms were developed.
The new rules would exempt children working with their parents on a true family farm (DOL last week made the exemptions even broader). They would also allow kids to raise animals for 4-H competitions and enroll in vocational training programs. They would prohibit children 15 years old and younger from operating tractors, augers, and other hazardous farm equipment, much as their peers off-the-farm cannot drive cars alone. Teens younger than 18 could not work inside grain elevators. Children could not work for money on tobacco farms because they are especially vulnerable to a form of nicotine poisoning known as “green tobacco sickness,” caused by dermal absorption of moisture that pools on the leaves. DOL received more than 10,000 comments on the rule, and is considering revisions through the normal, if excessively lengthy, administrative process.
Last week, the House Small Business Committee’s Subcommittee on Agriculture, Energy, and Trade held a hearing that gave agribusiness and Republican members ample opportunity (witnesses against: 4, witness in favor: 1) to excoriate these protections on the grounds that they would end “family” farming as we know it. Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont.), who is trying to unseat Democratic Sen. Jon Tester, threatened to attach a rider to the Labor Department’s appropriation bill to stop the new protections. The justification? They might prohibit him from hiring his 10-year-old neighbor to herd cashmere goats by riding a Kawasaki “youth” motorcycle after the undoubtedly startled critters.
“I think you’re sitting around watching reruns of ‘Blazing Saddles’ and that’s your interpretation of what goes on in the West,” the self-described fifth generation rancher turned Member of Congress condescended in the direction of DOL deputy wage and hour administrator Nancy Leppink.
Other witnesses at the hearing, provocatively entitled “The Future of the Family Farm: The Effect of Proposed DOL Regulations on Small Business Producers,” told stories about how rewarding it was for their children to feed baby calves, milk cows, and help their parents heft large bales of hay high up into the barn, coming of age in the process. None of these activities would be prohibited by the rule, of course, provided the child was actually helping her parents, and not working for minimum wage at a corporate farm. But imagine for a moment if a factory worker came to testify about how much it developed a child’s self-respect to spend 12 hours a day in a sweat shop, pretending that the experience was equivalent to helping grandma do needlework. There are still countries in the world that put children to work under such circumstances. But the United States made it illegal 74 years ago.
Full textThe White House announced Tuesday a legislative agenda it is sending Congress as part of its Startup America initiative to foster the growth of new businesses.
The White House was under some pressure to do wrong here: the President’s “Jobs Council” – a group mostly of CEOs – issued a report last month that included a perhaps unsurprising pile of old anti-regulatory proposals. And Senators Mark Warner and Jerry Moran were pushing the White House to endorse their bill, the Startup Act, which includes anti-regulatory measures that would weaken our existing environmental, health, and safety laws.
But here’s a bit of good news: the White House didn’t include any anti-regulation measures in the Startup America legislative agenda. The document gives just a polite nod to Warner-Moran:
The Administration looks forward to working with sponsors of similar initiatives including S. 1965 (Warner-Moran), S. 1866 (Coons-Rubio), S. 1544 (Tester-Toomey), S. 1933 (Schumer-Toomey), S. 1970 (Merkley-Bennet), H.R. 2930 (McHenry), H.R. 1070 (Schweikert), as well as with leaders from the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committees, including Chairwoman Landrieu, Senator Snowe, Chairman Graves and Representative Velazquez.
Too often this White House has tried to appease big business on the regulatory front, even adopting anti-regulation rhetoric. This has hurt, not helped, the White House politically. And it does nothing to create jobs. So it’s worth noting that the Administration got this one right.
A new poll out Wednesday shows that small business owners’ top concern is lack of demand (echoing previous polls). Weakening health and safety protections, on the other hand, is not popular with most of the electorate, and it hurts the public. Stalling the establishment of badly needed public safeguards and undermining federal agencies will not create new jobs. The Administration should keep that in mind, and resist pressure to endorse any anti-regulatory initiatives as it continues to work with Congress on these bills.
Full textLast week, a reporter asked me, “How’s science doing these days?,” “Science” is an impossibly big category, of course, but the answer was easy: “Badly,” I said.
Exhibit number one is climate change. The frightening truth is that no fewer than 84 percent of scientists in this country surveyed by Pew say that the earth is warming because of human activity; 70 percent describe the problem as “very serious.” Although much is made of the supposed “dissenters” on the issue, no one with any educated familiarity with the subject doubts that the vast—and I mean virtually all—scientists with meaningful credentials to understand the subject agree that precipitous climate change is happening and that curbing human-generated carbon emissions must be done to avert disasters so grave we can barely imagine them. Human beings have a hard time making sacrifices today to avert problems that seem remote, but the public’s ambivalence on this subject is reinforced by a steady and effective public relations campaign by fossil fuel companies to make the science of climate change seem fraught with doubt.
I am not willing to argue here that if we could only get the scientific truth straight, we could gallop across the tundra and solve this problem. How to apportion responsibility for sharply decreasing emissions between the developed and developing world is a challenge that may be the toughest we have ever faced. Not only do we lack the policymaking framework for negotiating such changes, but decades of flawed energy policies have hindered and continue to hinder the development of available and affordable solutions. But as long as we are stuck on the science—denying the consensus, elevating the few deniers to a position of equal authority as the well-informed—the short-term, self-serving concerns of a few trump the urgency of the problem for the many.
What leadership can we expect from politicians of both parties as we embark on contentious, high-stakes electoral season?
Full textA panel of business leaders comprising President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness today published a “Road Map to Renewal,” including proposals for expanded oil and gas drilling, and, of particular interest, five pages of policy recommendations related to regulation. Among them were procedural proposals aimed at further hamstringing regulatory agencies in their effort to promulgate badly needed safeguards for health, safety, and the environment.
For example, the Council proposes:
It’s worth noting that several of the proposals from the Jobs Council are ideas industry and its Republican allies have been pushing for a while; the cost-benefit requirement for independent agencies, for example, was included in the Regulatory Accountability Act and CURB Act, two bills popular in the GOP. The comments-on-comments concept, meanwhile, has been touted by the anti-regulation Center for Regulatory Effectiveness.
All in all, the recommendations start from a false premise – that environmental, health and safety safeguards are the economy’s problem – and proceed toward an unwise conclusion – building in further layers of review by economists. In fact, the regulations that industry is most distressed by already undergo a cost-benefit analysis at the agencies and then endure an industry-friendly second review at the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. As a recent CPR report demonstrates, OIRA’s review is the gateway to a gross politicization of the process, one that commonly results in weaker safeguards. Further review by another team of economists will only serve to slow and weaken needed protections.
Full textWith a reverential nod to maverick economist Jeff Madrick, who wrote a popular book of the same name, I begin today a series of blog posts entitled “The Age of Greed” that is designed to shine a bright spotlight into the dark corners where Washington lobbyists are busy looting the protection of public health, worker and consumer safety, and the environment. Business-as-usual efforts to stall or derail regulation won’t make it into this space. Rather, behavior has to be demonstrably and extraordinarily egregious to qualify for ridicule here. My first candidate: The largely successful efforts by the American Chemistry Council (ACC) and the American Forest and Paper Association (AFPA) to derail the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) study of the devastating health effects of dioxin—you read that right, dioxin!—for more than two decades, capped last week by its letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson deliberately misreading an appropriations rider in the Omnibus budget bill as a further excuse to suppress this basic science.
Everyone knows dioxin is terrible stuff. The chemical first became a household word in the 1970s when Vietnam veterans exposed to Agent Orange staggered home with the symptoms of dioxin exposure, among other debilitating health effects. In 2006, the National Research Council (NRC), normally a staid, hide-bound group of blue ribbon scientists more accustomed to scolding EPA than supporting it, opened its report on EPA’s star-crossed, two-decade effort to issue a final dioxin assessment under its Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) program as follows:
Full text2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD), also called dioxin, is among the most toxic anthropogenic substance ever identified. TCDD and a number of similar polychlorinated dioxins, dibenzofurans, and coplanar polychlorinated biphenyls (dioxin-like compounds [DLCs]) have been the subject of intense scientific research and frequently controversial environmental and health policies. Animal studies have demonstrated potent effects of TCDD, other dioxins, and many DLCs on tumor development, birth defects, reproductive abnormalities, immune dysfunction, dermatological disorders, and a plethora of other adverse effects. Because of their persistence in the environment and their bioaccumulative potential, TCDD, other dioxins, and DLCs are now ubiquitous environmental pollutants and are detected at low concentrations in virtually all organisms at higher trophic levels in the food chain, including humans. Inadvertent exposures of humans through industrial accidents, occupational exposures to commercial compounds (primarily phenoxyacid herbicides), and through dietary pathways have led to a wide range of body burdens of TCDD, other dioxins, and DLCs, and numerous epidemiological studies have attempted to relate exposures to a variety of adverse effects in humans.