Cross-posted from Legal Planet.
A current conservative refrain is the regulatory uncertainty is holding back the economy. Consider an editorial entitled “Obama’s regulatory flood is drowning economic growth”:
Businesses large and small face more uncertainty today about the federal regulatory environment than at any point since the New Deal . . . . Seeing this tsunami of red tape flooding out of Washington, company owners and executives wisely opt to delay new hires and investments until they have a clearer idea how much their already huge compliance costs will increase and how the markets will be warped by changes mandated by the bureaucrats.
Of course, it sounds better to talk about “regulatory uncertainty” than just to say that businesses hate the idea that they’ll have to cut pollution or give more information to consumers. In any event, there’s so much wrong with the “uncertainty” argument that it’s hard to know where to begin. Here are ten fatal flaws:
House Republicans have promised this week that upon their return to Washington after the recess they will attempt to stop 10 important proposed regulations because they are “job-destroying.” Adhering to the belief that “if you say it often enough, people will believe its true,” the party continues to insist that regulations cost jobs. But, as I discussed in a recent post, the evidence shows that regulation is not a drag on employment because it stimulates the creation of as many new jobs as are lost, and because job gains from regulation can offset job losses, leading to a net gain in employment.
But there is another problem with the Republican agenda: it ignores the benefits of regulation. A new CPR white paper on regulatory benefits indicates why the Republican deregulatory agenda won’t help with jobs and is a bad deal for Americans.
Government regulation has greatly benefited the American public, while the failure to regulate has cost us dearly. This reality is easily missed because no single, easily digested statistic perfectly proves the point. But, when my coauthors and I assembled the available evidence, we found that regulation has produced substantial and important benefits for the public without sacrificing jobs at the same time. There is simply no reason to suppose the regulations on the Republicans’ hit list will produce any different result.
This CPR white paper, Saving Lives, Preserving the Environment, Growing the Economy: The Truth About Regulation is the first of its kind to assemble the available evidence concerning the benefits of regulation. And the evidence is impressive. For example, according to OMB’s annual report on regulation to Congress, regulatory benefits exceed regulatory costs by 7 to 1 for significant regulations. Even these estimates don’t capture the full advantages of regulations; some benefits, such as reducing toxic mercury pollution, are difficult to monetize, and aren’t even counted. The advance estimates of benefits from agencies have historically proven lower than the benefits in reality. The payoff for environmental regulations is even greater. EPA estimates the regulatory benefit of the Clean Air Act exceeds its costs by a ratio of 25 to 1. Similarly, a study of EPA rules issued during the Obama Administration found that their regulatory benefits exceeded costs by a ratio as high as 22 to 1. Nevertheless, 8 of the 10 regulations House Minority Leader Eric Cantor put on his hit list are proposed EPA regulations.
Full textOn Monday, EPA announced its intention to revise the emergency planning rules for industrial facilities. The goal of the revisions is to give state and local emergency planning committees better information that they can use to prepare for chemical spills, explosions, and other disasters at industrial facilities. In the initial proposal released Monday, EPA disregards a request from first responders that the new rules demand more information about the total number of people likely to be on-site during an emergency situation. EPA is proposing that facilities simply report the number of full-time employees, rather than what first responders say would be a more useful estimate of the total number of people likely to be on-site, including contract workers and members of the public.
EPA’s emergency planning rules are based on congressional mandates found in the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA). EPCRA requires industrial facilities to report information about extremely hazardous substances that they store or use so that fire fighters and other first responders know what to expect when disaster strikes. EPA has developed simplified forms and a web-based system to facilitate easier compliance with the law and better access to information for response teams and emergency planners.
The statute’s history is a blue-green success story that underscores the inadequacy of one aspect of Monday’s proposal—a new data-point that would only count the number of full-time employees at a facility. In the late 1970s, unions in the United States undertook a major campaign centered on workers’ right to know about the hazards they faced in the workplace. By the early 1980s, their diverse efforts at individual workplaces and in several states prompted the development of a uniform federal standard, OSHA’s Hazard Communication standard. The key provisions of the “HazCom standard” require employers to provide their workers with Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) for chemicals to which they may be exposed and mandate training to help workers use that information. The standard isn’t perfect, but it brought practical implementation of the right-to-know principle to the federal level, setting the stage for EPCRA. Shortly after OSHA instituted the HazCom standard, Congress began working on amendments to the Superfund law. The workers who did the dirty job of Superfund site remediation joined with environmentalists and others to fight for an expansion of the right-to-know principle to the communities surrounding cleanup sites and other industrial facilities.
Full textOn Tuesday, EPA finalized important revisions to its Inventory Update Rule (IUR), which is the federal government’s primary means of finding out what chemicals are being produced or used, where they’re being produced and used, and in what quantities. The revisions close up some major loopholes created by the Bush administration and should give the agency more accurate data for its chemical management program, which GAO tagged in 2009 as being at “high risk” of becoming ineffective.
EPA made some important improvements to the rule, now dubbed the Chemical Data Reporting (CDR) rule. Manufacturers will once again have to submit data every four years, instead of every five. When they do, they’ll have to submit data for each year since the last report, instead of just the data from the year in which the report is due. The generic threshold for having to report detailed information about downstream uses of a chemical will be shifted back to apply to any chemical produced at a site in volumes exceeding 25,000 pounds in a year. That closes a loophole created by the Bush administration, which required only basic chemical identification and simplified on-site production volumes for manufacturers who kept production volumes below 300,000 pounds during the reporting year. And to further ensure that we begin to develop a better picture of how chemicals are distributed in commerce, the standard for reporting information about downstream uses has been changed from the Bush standard of only that which is “readily obtainable” (which, by rule, absolved manufacturers from “extensive file searches”), to a better standard of “reasonably ascertainable.” Those changes and others will give EPA and the public a much better picture of how chemicals pervade our lives.
However, EPA missed an opportunity to use this new rule to really help out its sister agencies OSHA and NIOSH. In my blog post from last August, when EPA proposed the revisions that were finalized yesterday, I noted that, by EPA’s admission, the IUR/CDR data only enabled EPA to develop “qualitative exposure characterizations with relative ranking of low, medium, or high for characterizing potential exposures to various populations,” including workers. Those exposure characterizations are inadequate for supporting protective regulation. At the time, EPA asked the public to comment on whether the updated IUR should include additional data elements, such as worker tasks or occupational exposure monitoring, to improve risk management capabilities at EPA and other agencies.
Full textToday marks 90 days since the last milestone in the White House’s push toward improvements in federal agencies’ scientific integrity policies. Agencies that have made progress in this time ought to release their draft plans and open them to public comment.
From an outsider’s perspective, there hasn’t been much progress to evaluate recently. It’s something we’ve gotten used to—after an initial push, this administration has not presented much of a sense of urgency in its efforts to set up new scientific integrity policies.
A quick timeline: President Obama issued an Executive Order in March 2009 that proclaimed the importance of ensuring scientific integrity in the federal government and assigned the task of developing new administration policies to the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), Dr. John Holdren. In December 2010, Holdren issued a memorandum to the heads of federal agencies, providing them with guidance and minimum standards for the new scientific integrity policies and giving them 120 days to report to him on their progress. According to a May 5, 2011 blog post by OSTP Student Volunteer Mira Atanassova,
more than 30 executive branch departments, agencies, and offices submitted progress reports on the development of their respective scientific integrity policies. A handful went even further than required and provided draft or complete policies for review.
At that time, Holdren gave all agencies 90 days to submit draft policies.
Full textIn April, CPR released a paper that looked at 12 critical rulemaking activities that we urged the Obama administration to finish by June 2012. The new regulatory agendas released by the agencies earlier this month show that instead of moving forward, the agencies are often slowing down. Contrary to the “tsunami” of regulations that the Chamber of Commerce claims is hampering economic recovery, this is a molasses flow that will delay life-saving public protections for workers, air breathers and water drinkers.
One rule that was on track in April is now definitely off track: an update to the National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) for particulate matter. Another rule that was on track is now probably off track: the Power Plant New Source Performance Standards for limiting greenhouse gases were pushed back from May 2012 to Jun 2012, which is the deadline we identified to complete rules in Obama’s first term (after that point, re-election politics will likely stifle any continued efforts to finish important rulemakings, and, in any event, rules completed after that point risk being overturned under the Congressional Review Act if Republicans are able to win both houses of Congress and the White House in the 2012 elections).
All or parts of eight of the rulemaking activities highlighted in the paper have been severely delayed since the paper was released in April:
The 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 textLast week, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) of the Office of Management and Budget released the semiannual regulatory agenda. I pointed out that the agenda, which contains the regulatory agencies’ planned actions, was quite late. Although the plans share problems from past years, like simply pushing back the target dates for regulatory actions, there are some pleasant surprises. For example, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is moving forward with some proactive regulatory responses to the Toyota recalls of 2009, and the EPA plans to propose or finalize updates to National Emissions Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants (NESHAPs) for 30 sources. Here’s an overview of some highlights (not covering everything) from the regulatory plans. More information about each individual rulemaking can be found by following the links.
Occupational Safety and Health Administration
Cross-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 textFor the last two decades, scientists have amassed evidence that bisphenol A (BPA) poses a threat to human health. BPA is a chemical used in the manufacture of polycarbonate plastic, can liners for food and beverages, and thermal paper used for register receipts. It is used in so many applications that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found traces of BPA in 93 percent of people it tested. Although scientists have targeted BPA as a public health concern, plastics industry lobbyists have attempted to thwart the efforts of federal, state, and local authorities to reduce exposure to BPA.
The industry arguments can confuse the public because the way BPA acts on the body is counter-intuitive. Contrary to the old toxicology axiom that “the dose makes the poison,” smaller amounts of BPA are linked to a host of negative health effects. BPA is an endocrine disruptor, a chemical that interferes with the body’s system of hormones. The endocrine system is very sensitive, so just a small amount of BPA at the wrong time can have major health consequences. That’s why scientists and parents alike are so concerned about BPA.
Infants and small children are the most vulnerable, and they are also the most highly exposed to BPA. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) should coordinate their efforts to regulate BPA. And Congress should improve the federal approach to toxics regulation by affirmatively empowering agencies like the EPA, FDA, CPSC and OSHA to regulate endocrine-disrupting compounds.
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