In a dispiriting reminder that the more things change, the more they remain the same, Rep. Jeff Landry (R-La.) plucked a page from former Rep. Tom Delay’s playbook, denouncing federal civil servants as “the Gestapo” because when he popped into a local office unannounced and without an appointment last week, staff kept him waiting for 20 minutes. When federal deepwater drilling permit chief Michael Bromwich objected to Landry’s appalling rhetoric, the Representative doubled down on idiotic and demanded that Bromwich apologize. Both Landry’s campaign and his congressional websites featured his pugnacious reiteration of the comment when checked immediately before this blog was posted.
First things first. I am a Jew. The extended family on my maternal grandmother’s side was wiped out by the Nazis. I had a typical upbringing for those born within a couple of decades of the Holocaust: the horror was deeply embedded in our memory and our emotional framework. I think most any Jew of our age—actually, of any age—cringes and feels like someone has walked over her ancestors’ graves when any person in public life bandies words like Gestapo and Nazi about. Louisiana most certainly has a Jewish population, and my hunch is that it will be more than a little interested in Landry’s over-the-top-while-still-down-in-the-gutter rhetoric. For that matter, lots of non-Jews in the state will be likely be embarrassed to hear that one of their elected representatives is so breezily invoking such a hateful institution as the Gestapo. (Landry’s office numbers are at the congressional website I linked to a bit earlier, for anyone inclined to make a call.)
Second, rhetoric fatigue definitely afflicts the nation. We are so accustomed to people saying ridiculous things that we barely pay them any attention. In this context, though, we need to take more seriously the excoriation of people who work for the government. Remember the Oklahoma City bombing? In its tragic wake, President Bill Clinton gave a somber talk to mourning families in which he spoke words we cannot afford to forget:
Full textI regret to report that CPR is losing its outstanding executive director, Shana Jones. Shana’s tenure has produced a true CPR success story, when the organization stabilized on the funding front and its staff began steady growth. When Shana joined us, CPR staff was half its current size. In great measure because of her steady hand at the tiller, we’ve developed in almost every significant way since then. Our budget and staff are bigger, our profile is higher, our mission is better defined, and, if you’ll pardon the hint of immodesty, we think we’ve made a difference on some important policy issues during her tenure. We’ll miss Shana when she leaves us early next year.
In the meantime, we’re in search of a similarly energetic and accomplished executive director. The job description is here. We encourage readers of CPRBlog to circulate the announcement to anyone who might be interested.
The deadline for applications is September 30.
Full textFrom what we hear, EPA is not a happy place these days, and we don’t wonder why. Never did a hard-pressed staff deserve so much guff, less. Politico reported that the White House is treating Lisa Jackson with kid gloves, hoping against hope that she won’t up and quit on them over the outrageous White House trashing of the efforts to update an outmoded, unhealthy, and legally indefensible 1997 ozone standard. Good thinking for a change. With the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) sending e-mails to 1.3 million members and online activists declaring that the White House “threw you overboard,” it’s way past time for the President, his Chief of Staff, and regulatory czar Cass Sunstein to remember they are Democrats, not soldiers in the Boehner army.
Obviously, no one knows what Jackson will do and the decision is both a personal and a difficult one. Ozone was extraordinarily offensive, and good arguments can be made that resignation is her best alternative. On the other hand, she has more work to do and only a hard kick in the rear will force the White House to let her do it. The least we can do is watch EPA like hawks, standing ready, willing, and able to call out industry interference at the earliest possible stage.
In that regard, we smell a rat chewing on the power cords that support EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS), the internationally renowned database of toxicological profiles that garners 2,000 hits a day (for a scientific database like this, that’s a lot). The American Chemistry Council has IRIS in the cross hairs, recently testifying before Congress that it should have all its work checked by the National Academies of Science. Then, on August 31, EPA published a notice that it would take public comment on its draft assessment of 1,4-dioxane, a Hazardous Air Pollutant under the Clean Air Act because it is a probable human carcinogen (cancer-causing agent). The chemical is used to stabilize trichloroethylene and perchloroethylene, especially in a military context. The draft IRIS profile would set an inhalation value—the amount that can be breathed in without adverse health effects--for the chemical because new studies have been done since IRIS first posted a profile in 1988. According to the EPA Toxics Release Inventory, 47 percent of releases of the chemical are in air.
Full textIn perhaps the most troubling sign of his determination to pander to business at the expense of public health, President Obama announced this morning that he had blocked EPA’s science-based efforts to lower the levels of smog that drive children and the elderly inside on Code Red days. Automobile manufacturers, power plant operators, the oil industry, and the Chamber of Commerce are breaking out the champagne, while the public health community despairs of the President who promised so much and has delivered so little.
The hard truth is that in this case the President has decided to flout the Clean Air Act to precisely the same extent as his predecessor.
The Act established a panel of doctors and scientists, known as the Clean Air Act Science Advisory Committee (CASAC), a blue ribbon panel with impeccable credentials. The panel has pleaded with EPA to lower ozone to at least 70—and preferably 60—parts per billion in the air. President Bush shoved aside these recommendations, setting a 75 ppb standard. President Obama has just ensured that this harmful level will persist for another several years.
The White House is spinning this as an effort to ease the burden on states and industry for the sake of the economy. In fact, it’s a cave-in to political pressure. No one should be fooled. As it turns out, "yes we can" has once again become "no, we daren’t."
Full textThe final agency regulatory “look-back” plans, released by the White House this morning, don’t appear to satisfy anyone. They fall far short of their obvious goal: to placate greedy and intemperate industry demands that major rules be cancelled. And they distress public interest advocates, who fear they will preoccupy agencies with make-work at the expense of crucial life-saving initiatives.
The plans themselves, at first look, are largely well-intentioned given the assignment the agencies were given. The EPA plan discusses, for instance, how the internet could be better used to facilitate on-line reporting by polluting plants. In some instances, though, the changes, if done as planned, would have real-life negative consequences: the planned axing of “clearance testing” under EPA’s renovation, repair and painting rule will save money, yes, but run the risk of leaving lead dust behind to poison children when they move back into renovated buildings. The EPA’s final plan dutifully calculates the cost savings of its regulatory changes, but it all but ignores foregone regulatory benefits, such as these.
The plans won’t placate big business or Republicans in Congress. Eric Cantor reliably called them “underwhelming,” while the Chamber of Commerce complained that the administration has made a “ a worthy effort at making technical changes to the regulatory process, but the results of this lookback will not have a material impact on the real regulatory burdens facing businesses today.”
Give a few inches, and you don’t get anything in return. So what is the White House doing, then?
Full textThis post was written by CPR President Rena Steinzor and Policy Analyst James Goodwin.
Few incidents better illustrate the Bush Administration’s outright hostility to politically inconvenient science than its 2008 rule updating the ozone National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS). In the run-up to that rule, Bush’s EPA ignored the unanimous recommendation of the Clean Air Science Advisory Committee (CASAC), an independent and well-respected advisor to the EPA on clean air issues, that it set the standard in the range of 60 to 70 parts per billion (ppb) to replace the existing standard of 84 ppb. Instead, the final rule—issued in the waning days of the Bush Administration—set the standard at 75 ppb, well above CASAC’s recommended range.
The ozone standard was so bad that soon after it was issued in 2008, CASAC took the unusual step of publicly criticizing Bush’s EPA for ignoring its advice.
Fortunately, the Obama Administration, which began before the ozone standard could take effect, delayed its implementation, and in September of 2010, the EPA began a formal reconsideration process to revise the ozone standard. The EPA is now set to issue a final rule setting the ozone standard somewhere in the recommended range of 60 to 70 ppb sometime next month—more than three years late. (In the interim, the original 84-ppb standard has remained in effect.)
Full textThe nation’s capital is all but intolerable these days, even for those of us who have lived here for decades and are used to excessive histrionics and gross summer weather. A pall of bad, hot, wet air has settled over the place, and serves as a backdrop to the slow-motion car wreck that is the debt ceiling negotiations—in every sense a crisis of political creation. In the midst of this misery, a small spark of comic relief was provided yesterday by the spectacle of hundreds of top-level business executives, led by the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce, pleading with their Tea Party allies not to run the economy into a ditch by provoking a default on the country’s financial obligations to institutions and governments across the globe. Having hitched its political wagon to a team of wild horses, big business has gone to the whip now that right-wing irrationality has impinged on its financial interests.
In fact, for years, big business has ridden quietly along while various brands of fiercely ideological conservatives drove the political wagon for the Republican party. Happily for them, the big business agenda—corporate welfare and the decimation of regulations that would rein in financial institutions; help blue-collar workers, and protect the environmental—fit neatly into the anti-“big government” mantra of their allies. When the Tea Party emerged, it seemed like the dance would never end. Dozens of newly elected Republicans were only too happy to make regulation the whipping boy for every problem that ails the economy, if only as a distraction from the real causes of the recession, which, let’s face it, have a lot to do with Republican anti-regulatory policies. Even better, the new Republican majority scheduled dozens of hearings aimed at brow-beating dozens of Administration officials from a cross-section of federal regulatory agencies. From Elizabeth Warren at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to Lisa Jackson at the Environmental Protection Agency, to David Michaels at the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, the Republicans are eager to blame the Obama Administration for the length and depth of the recession that began on the GOP’s watch.
Full textCross-posted from ACSblog.
A series of catastrophic regulatory failures in recent years has focused attention on the weakened condition of regulatory agencies assigned to protect public health, worker and consumer safety, and the environment. The failures are the product of a destructive convergence of funding shortfalls, political attacks, and outmoded legal authority, setting the stage for ineffective enforcement and unsupervised industry self-regulation. From the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico that killed eleven and caused grave environmental and economic damage, to the worst mining disaster in 40 years at the Big Branch mine in West Virginia with a death toll of 29, the signs of regulatory dysfunction abound. Peanut paste tainted by salmonella, lead-paint-coated toys, sulfur-infused Chinese dry wall, oil refinery explosions, degraded pipes at U.S. nuclear power plants: At the bottom of each well-publicized event is an agency unable to do its job and a company that could not be relied upon to put the public interest first.
Although everyone should be able to agree that these events are intolerable to the extent they are preventable, thoughtful analysis is too often sidetracked by the nation’s polarized debate over the role of government in our daily lives. Conservative commentators argue that accidents like the Gulf spill are the inevitable byproducts of industrialization, daunting in the best of times but having little to do with government failure. They say that over-regulation is a far more serious problem than under-regulation because bureaucrats run-amok are hobbling the country’s long-delayed recovery from a devastating world-wide recession. Progressive commentators respond that one of the government’s most important jobs is to prevent industry from trading safety for profit, by compelling manufacturers to install redundant, fail-safe mechanisms to protect public health and the environment. Spills, explosions, unchecked carbon emissions, tainted drugs, and unhealthy air pollution represent chronic failures by government to forbid conduct that lies in the mainstream of business as usual.
Full textManic House Republicans voted last Thursday to de-fund the implementation of a landmark law, passed just a few months ago, to strengthen Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) authority to police tainted food. Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), chairman of the House subcommittee that wrote the agriculture appropriations bill, announced on the House floor that the cuts were justified because the nation's food supply was “99.99 percent safe.”
“Do we believe that McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken and Safeway and Kraft Food and any brand name that you think of, that these people aren't concerned about food safety?,” Kingston said. “The food supply in America is very safe because the private sector self-polices, because they have the highest motivation. They don't want to be sued, they don't want to go broke. They want their customers to be healthy and happy.”
Sadly for Kingston, history’s not on his side. And in his case, it’s some fairly local history. In the fall of 2008, a salmonella outbreak in the United States claimed at least nine lives and made about 660 people sick. After considerable sleuthing, scientists traced the outbreak back to a peanut processing plant about 100 miles from Kingston’s congressional district. It turned out that the Peanut Corporation of America (PCA) had deliberately shipped peanut paste from its Blakely, Georgia, plant that it knew had been found in tests to have salmonella. The paste was used in hundreds of products made by other food manufacturers. When the FBI and FDA investigators converged on the plant, they found a slew of outright safety violations including a leaking roof, mold growing on ceilings and walls, rodent infestation, filthy nut processing receptacles, and feathers and feces in the air filtration system. The outbreak cost the peanut industry alone more than $1 billion, more than enough to provide the $995 million that President Obama requested to fund the FDA’s food safety initiatives for the next fiscal year.
Full textOffice of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) Administrator Cass Sunstein heads to the American Enterprise Institute Thursday morning to speak about federal agencies' plans to "look back" at and review existing regulations. Meanwhile, agencies statutorily obligated to protect public health and safety, such as EPA and OSHA, are diverting resources from pressing work so that they can structure and soon carry out a hunt for a supposed treasure of frivolous old regulations that need to be revised or eliminated. Strikingly, even industry itself has struggled to come up with enthusiasm for the effort -- or even a few specific examples of old rules it believes are unduly burdensome. It adds up to a not pretty picture.
President Obama called for the regulatory “look-backs” in his January 18 Executive Order on regulatory policy; the Order called on each agency to develop a "preliminary plan" within 120 days for how it would conduct its look-back. That time was up last Wednesday.
These existing regulations that are subject to look-back, of course, are not rules that rogue agency staffers made up out of thin air two weeks ago while doing all-nighters in the basement at EPA headquarters in the Ariel Rios building. Instead, in EPA’s case, the rules industry finds so offensive were mandated with great specificity in the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments. Industry and its allies tried to defeat the legislation then and failed. Then they tried to persuade EPA to adopt feeble regulations and failed. Then they challenged the regulations in court and failed. Now industry seeks its umpteenth bite of the apple—in fact, not much of even the apple core is left.
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