Late last month, the Department of Energy proposed long overdue energy efficiency standards for commercial refrigeration units. The rules, which had been held up at OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) for almost two years will result in savings of over $28 billion for businesses over the next 30 years and reductions in carbon emissions of 350 million tons over the same period. As we’ve discussed numerous times, rules are required by executive order to be reviewed by OIRA for no longer than 120 days. And OIRA routinely hangs onto them for months and frequently years. Recently, a rule to green federal office building just hit the two-year mark at OIRA.
So what’s happened in the past two years to slow down the progress of these two rules along with the other energy efficiency standards stuck at OIRA? After all, back in 2009, former Energy Secretary Steven Chu described energy efficiency standards as not just low hanging fruit, but “fruit lying on the ground.”
Savings for industry and consumers as well as reducing the burden of greenhouse gases on the environment seems like a no-brainer to anyone with common sense. But then, there are always House Republicans. Just this past summer, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) waged a war against ceiling fans. That’s right, she tacked on an amendment to the Energy and Water spending bill to stop a DOE rulemaking process to review ceiling fan standards mandated by Congress itself. Feverish and kneejerk anti-regulatory efforts like these have unfortunately taken off in recent years in spite of past bipartisan support for energy efficiency and in many cases, industry enthusiasm for moving forward.
Full textWe’ve often written in this space about the Obama Administration’s very bad idea to take federal inspectors of the line at poultry processing plants, leaving the discovery of blood, guts, and feathers on the carcasses to overworked and underpaid line workers forced to process as many as 70 birds per minute at the average plant. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is the architect of this proposal to “modernize” the food safety system without requiring a single additional test to make sure the birds are not infested with salmonella, campylobacter, and other bad bugs. Confirming the rule’s primary role as a windfall for the poultry industry, USDA’s initial cost-benefit analysis indicated that it would save companies like Holly Farm, Tyson’s, and Perdue $250 million annually. That windfall is attributable to the fact that under the proposal, the line speed will at least double, to as many as 175 birds per minute.
Today, GAO released a report that further discredits this bad idea, confirming the dire warnings of food safety experts: USDA is relying on junk data from a pilot program, raising the strong possibility that any final rule won’t survive judicial review. This rule is so controversial that it will almost certainly be challenged in court. When it is, it will be reviewed under the Administrative Procedure Act’s arbitrary and capricious standard, and USDA is running the risk that a judge will find the agency’s shoddy analysis fails to meet the standards of quality demanded by the Administrative Procedure Act (APA).
Full text
No week seems to go by without an imbalanced attack on regulatory protections by a trade association, a “think-tank,” a member of Congress, or a journalist. These attacks frequently feature a reference to the growth in the Code of Federal Regulations, even though it is a meaningless measure of whether we’re overregulated. In offering another bill to diminish regulation, Sen. Angus King, for example wrote last week that, “According to a recent study by the Progressive Policy Institute, the number of pages of federal regulations has increased by 138 percent since 1975, from 71,224 pages to 163,301 in 2011.”
That might sound like a lot of pages, but if you’re not using methylene chloride, polyvinyl chloride or hexavalent chromium, the hundreds of pages devoted to regulating those chemicals have no effect on you or your business. The same goes for IRS transfer pricing regulations, the Department of Agriculture’s beef slaughtering regulations, or OSHA’s crane safety regulations. No one in a small retail business, the tourism industry, or Maine’s lobster industry cares about or need worry about any of them.
Like most of his colleagues, Sen. King denounces “excessive and unnecessary regulations” without identifying examples. If he has a legitimate example, he should let the secretary of the appropriate agency know about it, or work to repeal it legislatively.
Instead, he and his colleague, Sen. Roy Blunt, propose the creation of a 9 member commission that would identify regulations “in need of streamlining or repeal.” The commission would report their recommendations to Congress in the form of a bill that would be “fast-tracked” (protected from many of the normal motions and procedures) and that could not be amended. This proposal is flawed in a number of ways.
First, the proposal does not specify who the commission would enlist to do the necessary cost-benefit analyses, paperwork analyses, etc. The bill provides no authorization of funding and gives no clue as to how many staff would be employed, what their expertise would be, how they would be paid, or what resources would be given to them. It is not clear that they would even be federal employees. Would the staff be supplied by the regulated industries or the Chamber of Commerce?
Full textAfter more than two years of White House review, OSHA has finally published its proposed new standards for silica exposure. Secretary of Labor Tom Perez, Assistant Secretary David Michaels, and many other people both inside and outside the agency deserve congratulations for finally shaking the proposal loose from the clutches of the president’s regulatory review team in OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The publication of the proposal is an important step towards protecting millions of Americans who are exposed to the deadly dust in their workplaces.
But this is no time for the agency to rest on its laurels. As GAO noted in a recent report, OSHA proposals published in the 2000s took an average of three years to reach the “final rule” stage. If it takes that long to publish the final silica rule, it will be in jeopardy of falling prey to election-year politics. The Obama administration’s regulatory agencies published fewer final rules in 2012 than the agencies published in any of the prior 15 years. (Thanks to Curtis Copeland for this analysis.) It is incumbent upon Secretary Perez, Assistant Secretary Michaels, and their entire team to keep this rule moving along expeditiously. That means no extensions of the comment periods, efficient management of the rulemaking hearings, and a hardline stance against the White House’s regulatory review team, which has a history of holding up this rule.
Today marks an important step forward for workers, but the finish line is a long way off.
Full textLike no other mammoth corporation that did very bad things—not Enron, not WorldCom, not Exxon, and not even HSBC (which, after all, laundered money for the Mexican drug cartel and was allowed to pay a fine without pleading guilty!)—BP has not lost its arrogant swagger. In a fit of high dudgeon it filed a lawsuit last week challenging the one step the federal government has taken that could actually hurt the company over the long run: the long-overdue debarment of this chronic scofflaw from receiving contracts to supply fuel to the U.S. military.
Despite the semi-hysterical, every-argument-known-to-humans tone of its 127-page legal filing, Bob Dudley, BP’s chief executive officer, has been blithe about the effect of the debarment on its bottom line: “We have largest acreage position in Gulf of Mexico, more than 700 blocks…that’s plenty, we have a lot (sic),” he told the Telegraph, a British newspaper, a few weeks ago. “We have been debarred from supplying fuel to the U.S. military going forward but quite frankly we have a very big business in the U.S. and this is not distracting us from what we do.”
The Clean Water Act authorizes the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to debar companies that are not “responsible” from doing business with the government. Other provisions of federal law give the Pentagon the same authority but it could not be bothered to find a different fuel supplier even after the Deepwater Horizon explosion killed 11 and devastated the Gulf of Mexico. Showing itself once again to be one of the last feisty entities left in government, and after contemplating just such an action since 2005, EPA debarred BP in November 2012, just a few short months before the company pled guilty to manslaughter, a slew of environmental crimes, and—just for good measure--lying to Congress. It paid a $4 billion fine—the largest in history but Dudley is apparently still smiling.
The term “scofflaw” should not, of course, be used lightly. For those who need a little boning up on BP’s recidivist history, consider the following and let’s ask ourselves whether we might have avoided the entire Deepwater Horizon horror had EPA been allowed to debar the company back in 2005.
Full textFinally! After far too much hullabaloo about the cost of regulations, there was a U.S. Senate hearing today on why public health regulations are important, and how delays by Congress and the Administration have serious negative consequences for people’s lives. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) called the hearing entitled “Justice Delayed: The Human Cost of Regulatory Paralysis,” the first one conducted by the Senate Judiciary Committee’s newly created Subcommittee on Oversight, Federal Rights and Agency Action. The witnesses included a parent-turned advocate for automobile safety, AFL-CIO director of safety and health Peg Seminario, and law professor Rena Steinzor of the Center for Progressive Reform.
Steinzor kicked off her testimony with a short litany of regulatory successes:
”One does not need to look far to see how essential regulations are. Just ask anyone whose life was saved by a seat belt, whose children escaped brain damage because the EPA took lead out of gas, who turns on the faucet knowing the water will be clean, who takes drugs for chronic illness confident the medicine will make them better, who avoided have their hand mangled in machinery on the job because the emergency switch was there to cut off the motor, who has taken their kids to a heritage national park to see a bald eagle that was saved from the brink of extinction—-the list goes on and on.”
She went on to skewer industry lobbyists for the attacks on EPA’s efforts to regulate green house gas emissions, air quality standards, coal ash, stormwater runoff, PBDE’s and other chemicals. Steinzor’s testimony is punctuated throughout with powerful prose, such as:
· [Former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson] “did not take a trip to the basement of the building where the agency is housed and get drunk on her own whiskey, writing down her best fantasies for torturing industry. Rather, she did her best–at long last–to satisfy congressional mandates instructing her agency to impose more stringent controls on power plants, automobile fuel, boilers, etc.”
· “The truth is that these rules, and the civil servants who write them, do not sweep industry’s hard-earned money into a pile and set it on fire for no good reason. The regulations impose costs, but they also deliver tremendous benefits. Ignoring those benefits has become standard practice in the House of Representatives…”
· “Self-rightous crusaders against regulators have become fond of railing against the “costs” that come with regulatory decision-making, but they conveniently ignore the most critical questions: Costs for whom? Industry or the public that suffers from industry’s polluting activities? By ignoring this question, opponents of regulation are free to continue pretending that if we dismantled the regulatory system, we would suffer no negative consequences and instead reap a windfall in saved money.”
Full textYesterday President Obama signed an executive order, entitled “Improving Chemical Facility Safety and Security,” that is designed to get state, federal and local chemical safety agencies and first responders to improve coordination, information gathering, and regulation with respect to the risks posed by the many highly reactive chemical compounds that are stored and used throughout the United States.
Coordination and Data Sharing.
The Executive Order also addresses the easier question of coordination and data sharing among agencies with responsibility for protecting the public from chemical explosions.
Among other things the working group is supposed to:
• Identify ways to improve coordination among the Federal Government, first responders, and State, local, and tribal entities
• Identify ways to ensure that the various state, local and federal entities with responsibilities for regulating reactive chemicals and reacting to explosions, either accidental or intentional (for example, acts of terrorism) of reactive chemicals “have ready access to key information in a useable format”
• Identify areas where joint collaborative programs can be developed or enhanced
• Identify opportunities and mechanisms to improve response procedures and to enhance information sharing and collaborative planning between chemical facility owners and operators and the relevant governmental agencies; and
• Examine opportunities to improve public access to information about chemical facility risks consistent with national security needs and appropriate protection of confidential business information
Full textTomorrow, a new panel in the Senate Judiciary Committee—the Subcommittee on Oversight, Federal Rights, and Agency Action—will bring some much-need sanity to the discussion of federal regulatory policy when it holds a hearing entitled “Justice Delayed: The Human Cost of Regulatory Paralysis.” What’s so refreshing about this hearing is that it starts from the premise that blocked and delayed safeguards are a problem that needs to be solved.
Crucially, this hearing will provide an opportunity to shine a light on the costs that are imposed on the public when regulations aimed at protecting people and the environment are unnecessarily delayed. These costs represent real harm to real people—and they are by definition preventable.
Previously, in this space, I examined the costs to the public that would result from the new delays to three rules that were announced in the Spring 2013 Regulatory Agenda. These included at least 300 premature deaths from the delay of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) Rearview Mirror Rule and at least 1,000 premature deaths and 1,467 non-fatal heart attacks that would result from the delay of the EPA’s updated ozone National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS). All of these costs are preventable, but not prevented.
Several of the scheduled witnesses for tomorrow’s Senate Judiciary hearing will help to provide a clear picture of what the costs of regulatory delay entail. CPR President Rena Steinzor will testify about how environmental regulations have benefited the public greatly, and how the continued delay of several pending safeguards—such as the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) rules to control disposal of hazardous coal ash waste and to require cleaner-burning automobile fuel—produce great harm.
Tomorrow’s hearing is a welcome development, because when it comes to the issue of federal regulatory policy, sanity has been in short supply on Capitol Hill for the last four-plus years. And the timing of the hearing couldn’t be better, as it takes place during what House Republicans are calling “Stop Government Abuse Week,” a week dedicated to bashing public servants and voting on ill-conceived bills, including the REINS Act and the Energy Consumers Relief Act, which if passed, would make it all but impossible for the EPA and other agencies to carry out their congressionally mandated missions of safeguarding the public.
Full textThe U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, better known as CSB, is held a meeting today to discuss several recommendations and a newly created “Most Wanted Program.” CSB has invited public input, so CPR President Rena Steinzor and I submitted comments to CSB yesterday, urging the agency to target the White House in its advocacy efforts related to the Most Wanted Program.
CSB has numerous recommendations that it considers “open” because the target of those recommendations, be it OSHA, another federal agency, a private standards organization like the NFPA, or another target, has yet to implement the recommendation.
The recommendations aimed at federal agencies are an especially tricky group, given the realities of the regulatory system. As we’ve discussed in this space before, OSHA’s regulatory efforts have been running up against significant resistance from the White House. A prime example is the proposal to tighten regulations on silica exposure, which has been stuck in the limbo of White House review for over two years. Until the White House decides that improving occupational safety and health is a priority, OSHA’s regulatory program will struggle to implement much-needed worker protections and CSB’s “Most Wanted” are going to remain at large.
Full textThe Senate’s grudging confirmation of Tom Perez as Secretary of Labor was the first piece of good news working people have had out of the federal government for quite some time. I know Perez--as a neighbor, a law school colleague, Maryland’s labor secretary, and a civil rights prosecutor. He’s a fearless, smart, and hard-driving public servant—exactly the qualities that Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and his caucus deplore in Obama appointees. With luck, Perez will be successful in direct proportion to the unprecedented vitriol Republicans hurled in his path. Their efforts to define a “new normal” for appointees—no one need apply who has ever done or said anything the most rabid member of the Tea Party might dislike—should not distract us from the real challenges confronting Perez within the Administration.
The success or failure of Perez's tenure will be decided not by Mitch McConnell, but by a White House whose political operatives have squashed every significant regulatory initiative suggested by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) star-crossed leader, David Michaels. In fact, so relentless has this punishing counter-campaign been that there now exists the very real possibility that President Barack Obama, who probably owes at least his first-term victory to the hard work of organized labor, will finish eight years in office having promulgated only two rules to address grave threats to worker safety and health. One is the revised Hazard Communication Standard, requiring employers to change the way they notify workers about toxic chemicals in the workplace. The other changed the rules covering use of cranes and derricks in the construction industry, focusing mostly on training, certification, and inspection requirements. The “HazCom” revisions were largely driven by changes to international standards and the cranes and derricks rule was developed through a negotiated rulemaking process during the George W. Bush Administration. So, other than whatever gains the agency may have achieved through enforcement, its rulemaking agenda has almost run off the tracks, and it will take a herculean effort to get it back on.
Full text