Last month, the American Chemistry Council sent a letter to Jacob Lew, Director of the Office of Managmenet and Budget, calling on OMB to “take greater responsibility in the coordination and review of chemical safety assessments” and to “require EPA to submit all ongoing EPA IRIS assessments to the NAS for independent review.” The letter was the latest industry attack on the Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS), the EPA’s primary toxicological database. IRIS assessments of chemicals are used in regulatory decisions to protect the public, safety decisions by industry, and as evidence offered in litigation.
Today CPR President Rena Steinzor and Member Scholar Wendy Wagner wrote to Lew to rebut the ACC’s arguments, and to urge OMB not to take an inappropriate role in scientific assessments:
ACC’s request that OMB play a larger role in the scientific work of conducting IRIS assessments is a thinly veiled attempt to slow the IRIS process and thereby prevent EPA from promulgating rules that will directly benefit public health and improve the quality of life for millions of Americans. Not only will these requested delays create more work for any agency involved, including OMB, but this unnecessary review will significantly increase the costs of regulating by hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars for each new IRIS assessment.
Steinzor and Wagner also argued that review of IRIS assessments by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) would serve to delay assessments:
Contrary to ACC’s implications, perfection in an IRIS assessment will not be achieved through recurring NAS review. The science of toxicology is inherently uncertain and reasonable scientists will have different interpretations of the available data. More research will always be possible. That is why Congress empowered EPA to act with precaution to protect the public and the environment from toxic chemicals. If EPA had to obtain two rounds of NAS review for each and every IRIS assessment, as ACC requests for the next two years, the agency would fall even further behind in promulgating required rules, which would directly result in the loss of millions of dollars and human lives.
The full letter is here.
Full textCPR Member Scholar Doug Kysar has a post over at Nature with more analysis on the Supreme Court's ruling this week in the American Electric Power v. Connecticut case. Writes Kysar:
The court went out of its way to emphasize that federal common-law actions would be barred, even if the EPA decides not to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions. In other words, the fact that the agency has authority under the Clean Air Act — even if it chooses not to exercise it — was enough, in the court's view, to cut the judiciary out of the equation, stating, "We see no room for a parallel track."
The problem with this is that the US system of limited and divided government is a web of interconnected nodes, not a row of parallel tracks. The courts should understand that part of judges' role is to prod and plea with other government branches, which may be better placed to address an area of societal need, but are less disposed to try.
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How easy it is to make fun of those out-of-control, unelected government bureaucrats! The examples of their wild behavior are just so plentiful. Here's Tim Pawlenty in his big economic speech this morning (prepared remarks, video):
Conservatives have long made the federal bureaucracy the butt of jokes. And considering some of the bureaucrats in Washington, and what they're actually in charge of doing -- like the strength of our showerheads, the vigor of our toilet flushes, or the glow of our reading lamp -- you know, it’s hard not to laugh, or cry, about such things.
Actually, no.
The showerhead and toilet standards were set by Congress in the Energy Policy Act of 1992. From the law:
The maximum water use allowed for any showerhead manufactured after January 1, 1994, is 2.5 gallons per minute when measured at a flowing water pressure of 80 pounds per square inch.
The law also set a 1.6 gallon/flush standard on most toilets. American life went on.
The law addressed manufacturers, not homeowners, so homeowners aren’t required to change their existing showerhead. It wasn’t a particularly controversial law at the time, passing the House 381-37 and the Senate 93-3. It was signed into law by the not-so-liberal George H.W. Bush. Showerheads were back in the news last year when the Department of Energy said the law meant manufacturers couldn’t attach multiple nozzles onto one fitting and thus double the flow of water. The controversy was irrelevant to the vast majority of Americans, who use showers with a single head.
Full textWe noted earlier this month that a U.S. Small Business Administration official had claimed that the danger of workplace noise was solved just as well with earplugs as it is with reducing the noise at its source -- despite extensive research to the contrary ("Presidential Appointee at SBA Maligns OSHA's Industrial Noise Proposal; Claims Ear Plugs 'Solve' the Problem").
The official, Winslow Sargeant, Chief Counsel for Advocacy at the SBA, has since given a slightly different line. From BNA's Occupational Safety and Health Reporter (4/28):
We strongly support regulations that protect worker safety and health," Sargeant said. "But with regard to the noise rule, we were unable to evaluate whether this proposal was necessary, as a matter of safety, or whether it was economically feasible.
If SBA has indeed not evaluated the safety necessity, it's troubling that Sargeant had previously made such a strident claim about the safety issue being "solved" by earplugs. Sargeant has no obligation to be an expert on the safety benefits of noise controls; he could simply say, as he has, that he is concerned about the costs. Going further and demeaning the safety benefits as nonexistent -- and then later admitting his office was "unable to evaluate" them -- is not helpful.
Full textIt's their favorite figure: $1.75 Trillion. Repeated ad nauseam in congressional hearings by members of congress and expert witnesses alike, it is the supposed annual cost of regulations, this according to a study from last year commissioned by the Small Business Administration's Office of Advocacy. Sponsors of anti-regulatory legislation like the number: Olympia Snowe and Tom Coburn included it in the 'findings' of their bill, while Geoff Davis, chief sponsor of the REINS Act, cites it regularly. It's been used by John Boehner and Eric Cantor, and House committee chairs Fred Upton, Darrell Issa, Lamar Smith, and Sam Graves. Conservative think tanks like the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation are fond of it. A few Democrats have gotten in on the act, too: Mark Warner, proponent of his own anti-regulatory plan, has cited it, as has Nydia Velazquez, Ranking Member of the House Small Business Committee.
Is it correct? In February, a CPR white paper found a series of flawed methods in the SBA's study, and showed that most of the SBA's number was derived from a regression analysis that used opinion polling data on perceived regulatory climate.
Now the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) has published its own report examining the SBA study. CRS looked at a number of aspects of the SBA-commissioned study, and found an awful lot of questionable assumptions. I encourage you to check it out.
I'm not going to try to summarize the whole CRS report here, but I think this excerpt gets to the heart of some of the problems in the SBA study, which was conducted by economists Nicole Crain and Mark Crain:
More than 70% of the overall estimate ($1.236 trillion) is based on the WGI index of regulatory quality for the United States, with the authors determining the extent to which economic regulations reflected in that index reduces per capita real GDP in the United States. However, one of the authors of the regulatory quality index has said that Crain and Crain misinterpreted the index, and that higher values on the index cannot be interpreted as “less stringent regulations.” Even if it could, he said that the index for the United States should be compared to a country with a preferable index, not to an idealized “best possible” score on the index. Comparing the United States’ regulatory quality index in 2008 to the country with the highest index that year (Ireland) would have reduced Crain and Crain’s estimate of the cost of economic regulations by nearly two-thirds. Other commenters (including one of the peer reviewers of the Crain and Crain study) raised similar concerns about whether the regulatory quality index could be used to measure the cost of economic regulations, and about the regression analysis used to produce the cost estimate.
Folks who have cited the SBA study triumphantly ought to take a step back and really look at the study and CRS's new report. Is the SBA's methodology something they'd want to defend?
Full textSo far as regulatory safeguards are concerned, we've come a long way in 27 months. The Obama Administration started with federal agencies that had been devastated by eight years of an explicitly anti-regulatory president. Turning that around is not easy, and no President could do it in a day. So, as much as you see a lot of criticism in this space, you also see praise, because we've seen this Administration make important progress. From new rules on lead paint removal to construction crane safety to regulating greenhouse gases, there's a lot to applaud -- changes that will make real differences in people's lives.
But there are also a lot of rulemakings or other initiatives that fall somewhere in the "pending" category. Delay has a real cost in human health and lives. But the problem's not just that. It's that for many of these important safeguards, the administration runs the risk of not completing them at all, or not during this term. The political pressures against some of these health and safety protections in the name of maintaining industry business as usual can be huge.
A new CPR white paper today, Twelve Crucial Health, Safety, and Environmental Regulations: Will the Obama Administration Finish in Time?, identifies key rules that are critical but unfinished, and urges the administration to adopt a sense of urgency. Nine of the twelve regulations in the report are named as being in danger of not being completed during the President's first term.
Full textClaudia Rodgers, Deputy Chief Council for the Office of Advocacy at the U.S. Small Business Administration, testified earlier this month at a hearing conducted by a House Oversight and Government Reform sub-committee. The session ("Assessing The Impact of Greenhouse Gas Regulations on Small Business") was a sparsely attended affair on all sides of the room. But something important happened.
Rep. Jackie Speier asked Rodgers a series of questions (at 1:03:30 in the video) about the Office of Advocacy’s oft-cited report from September, by economists Nicole Crain and Mark Crain, which claims that the cost of regulations in the U.S. in 2008 was $1.75 trillion dollars. Representative Speier cited CPR’s recent report debunking the study. In response, Rodgers mostly gave little new information, telling Speier she'd get back to her. But then there was this:
Rep. Speier:
... Ms. Rodgers, does your office have the data used in the Crain and Crain study, and if so, will you please make that data available to us?
Rodgers:
I will check and see if our office has the data, would make available to you. I do know that it is... I'm told that it is available through Crain and Crain on their website, or through their website, that they have made it available. When we contract out studies, our office is not required to ask of that data and make it publicly available ...
Problem is, if it is somewhere on their website, no one's been able to find it.
Full textWhen the U.S. Small Business Administration issued a study last September claiming regulations cost the U.S. economy $1.75 Trillion in a single year, the agency trumpeted that the "report was peer reviewed consistent with the Office of Advocacy’s data quality guidelines."
But the peer review file included with the study was embarrassingly meager -- comments from all of two individuals. The authors, economists Nicole Crain and Mark Crain, ignored a fundamental criticism raised by one of the two reviewers that struck at the very heart of their estimates of economic regulatory costs. The second reviewer's complete comment had the sort of casual quality to it that suggested a somewhat less than thorough review. The review, in its entirety: “I looked it over and it's terrific, nothing to add. Congrats[.]"
When CPR Member Scholars issued a report in February critiquing SBA's study, they noted that the peer-review process was unimpressive. CPR co-author Sidney Shapiro sent a letter at the time to Karen Mills, the SBA Administrator, and Dr. Winslow Sargeant, Chief Counsel of the SBA's Office of Advocacy, calling on the SBA to withdraw the study and disavow its findings. The letter noted, among other problems, the inadequate peer review.
Dr. Sargeant responded with a letter in March, standing by the report and waving off the CPR report’s very thorough criticisms, although without responding to the specifics. There was perhaps little of particular surprise, except one bit about the peer review process. Wrote Sargeant:
Full textAdvocacy offered the study for review to a number of individuals with expertise in regulatory cost-benefit analysis, including former heads of Federal regulatory agency economic analysis offices and academics who have published in the field.
CPR Member Scholar Robert Glicksman testifies at a hearing this afternoon on "Raising the Agencies' Grades – Protecting the Economy, Assuring Regulatory Quality and Improving Assessments of Regulatory Need." The hearing will be held by the Courts, Commercial and Administrate Law subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee.
The hearing will feature two witnesses from the Mercatus Center, who will argue that federal agencies produce flawed regulations, and need to engage in more rigorous regulatory analysis to provide better justifications of the need for and content of regulations.
This misses the reality, Glicksman argues in his testimony:
Full textwhile the current regulatory process is indeed flawed, the problems for the most part are not the result of agencies adopting regulations without justification or regulations whose social costs exceed their benefits. Instead, the primary problem is regulatory dysfunction resulting from providing agencies with inadequate resources to fulfill their statutory responsibilities, not giving agencies sufficient tools to address significant health, safety, and environmental risks, and burdening agencies with what are already excessive and unhelpful analytical obligations.
CPR Member Scholar Joel Mintz has an op-ed in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel taking a look at the House's continuing resolution for the FY 2011 budget and what it would do to the EPA. Writes Mintz:
House leaders would have us believe they're cutting fat from the budget. In fact, they're taking dead aim at nerves, muscles, and vital organs. EPA's existing regulations — and their enforcement — provide vital protections against emissions of toxic air and water pollutants, contamination of public water supplies, the abuse of dangerous pesticides, exposure of school children to asbestos, releases of poisonous chemicals from abandoned hazardous waste dumps, and the destruction of fish, shellfish, and other aquatic life.
If the House-proposed EPA budget cuts — or anything anywhere close to them — are enacted into law, EPA's ability to implement all of those protections (along with other important facets of its work) would be very severely restricted. The EPA might well be forced to reduce the size of its already overburdened work force, making it all the more difficult to enforce environmental laws. EPA's crucial contributions to protect vast natural resources and ecosystems — including those in the Gulf of Mexico, Great Lakes, Chesapeake Bay, San Francisco Bay, Puget Sound, and Long Island Sound will also be dramatically reduced.
The full op-ed is here.
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