As reported in a post Saturday, OMB has become the epicenter for industry efforts to head off an EPA regulation concerning coal ash. There have been 17 meetings between industry interests and OMB officials. When questioned about the large number of meetings, an OMB spokesman said, "This has been a very regular, very normal deliberative process on a very complex rule.” For progressives who had hoped that OMB in the Obama administration would not replicate OMB in the Bush administration, this is disappointing news.
Industry swarmed to OMB after EPA had submitted a draft rule on coal ash to OMB for its approval. Under a presidential order, agencies like EPA must submit significant new regulations, like the coal-ash rule, to the White House for review prior to the time that they are officially proposed. Unhappy that their efforts to persuade EPA to propose a different rule had not worked, industry groups went to the White House to get the draft rule rewritten. The industry tactic is time-honored. In Republican administrations, OMB opened its door to industry interests, and it regularly intervened to force agencies to weaken regulatory proposals. Public interest groups have been watching OMB in the Obama administration to see if this practice might change.
James Goodwin, a CPR analyst, was one of the first to draw attention to OMB’s multiple meetings concerning the coal ash rule. Goodwin also found that OMB was regularly meeting with industry groups on other issues, but seldom meeting with public interest groups. CPR’s president, Rena Steinzor, has written OMB objecting to this unbalanced approach.
Full text"White House, EPA at Odds Over Coal-Waste Rules" reads a headline in Saturday's Wall Street Journal. It's worth a look.
The White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) has in fact continued to host meetings with outside groups regarding EPA’s work on a rule for controlling the disposal of hazardous coal ash waste. Since my last post on this topic, OIRA has hosted 10 more meetings on this topic. (These latest meetings were held between December 9 and January 4.) This brings the grand total of OIRA coal ash meetings to 21—all in a time span of less than 3 months!
The meetings are particularly significant since the industry is lobbying OIRA before EPA has even issued a proposed rule. By law, a proposed agency rule is followed by a public comment phase, where industry would have the full opportunity to make their case (see my previous post for more detail on the process).
Seven of the recent meetings were with industry groups, including representatives of industries that “reuse” coal ash, and the power industry (see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). OIRA held an additional three meetings on the topic with public interest groups (see here, here, and here). In all then, OIRA has hosted 17 meetings with industry groups on coal ash and four meetings with public interest groups.
The WSJ's assessment is that the White House and EPA are "at odds" over the issue. EPA’s decision in December to postpone the completion of a proposed rule was certainly notable. And one thing is clear: The industry will continue to try to use OIRA to push EPA into developing a weak coal ash rule that benefits its own parochial interests at the expense of the public’s interest. We'll continue to keep an eye on it.
Full textCPRBlog asked some of our regular bloggers to give us some suggestions for the high and low points of the regulatory year. We began by taking the Bush Administration’s “midnight regulations” off the table, so that we could focus in on the Obama Administration’s impact to date. CPR Policy Analyst Matt Shudtz offers up a number of items, below, focusing on the positive:
At OSHA, several high points:
The leadership of David Michaels (as Assistant Secretary, the head of OSHA) and Jordan Barab (as Deputy Assistant Secretary), both of whom seem intent on putting OSHA back on task – protecting workers – after years of agency wheel-spinning.
OSHA’s enforcement sweep of construction sites in Texas, in which the agency brought inspectors from other regions to conduct unannounced inspections. Actual enforcement of the laws! Texas earned the honor because it has the highest rate of construction fatalities in the nation.
Assessing meaningful fines. OSHA proposed the largest fine in its history this year. Under the proposal, BP would pay $87.4 million for safety violations and its failure to correct hazards at the Texas City refinery, where an explosion killed 15 workers and injured 170 in 2005.
Dear Cass:
As you know, we picked a spat with the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) last week over Randy Lutter’s supposedly temporary detail appointment to your office. It’s not the first time we’ve criticized the workings of OIRA, and almost certainly won’t be the last.
I’ve spoken to a number of people in the media and elsewhere who have expressed surprise that progressive organizations like CPR are such relentless critics of a progressive Administration. I’m sure Administration officials feel this frustration as well. That dynamic is at work in OIRA’s case because you have a reputation as a progressive thinker on many issues.
I won’t try to speak for all progressives, but I can assure you that very few of us criticize the Administration lightly. Nor do we do it with any sense of pleasure. The Obama Administration inherited an absolute mess on every front and progressives are well aware of the herculean effort you are making to dig out. But while it is tempting to take refuge in the notion that if only a few things are better at the end of however many terms the voters give President Obama, that limited vision is not why you signed up to serve, nor is it why so many of us voted for your man.
Full textAs reporters dug deeper on our post yesterday about the return of Randy Lutter, chief economist at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under the George W. Bush Administration, to “regulatory czar” Cass Sunstein’s office, OMB spokesman Tom Gavin worked to downplay the significance of Lutter’s reappearance. Gavin confirmed that Lutter was in fact ensconced in OIRA, as reported by Inside EPA this morning, but said he was merely “on detail” from the FDA as a career civil servant who would report up the chain of command to Sunstein. The implication, of course, is that Lutter would have little influence on policy.
How heartwarming that argument must have been for civil servants at OIRA and elsewhere. As my colleague Sid Shapiro and I argue in a forthcoming book (The People's Agents and the Battle to Protect the American Public, arriving in spring), civil servants are the backbone and future hope of good government. Precisely because they play such an important role, their policy positions from past lives deserve scrutiny. And Randy Lutter is not a typical civil servant. Rather, he rose through the ranks both at OIRA and within FDA, while advancing the most rigid iterations of cost-benefit analysis. In fact, he is so widely known that word of his return to OIRA was spread to outside advocates like me by agitated civil servants, who see his return as further evidence that that OIRA is going to continue business as usual from Bush II.
In addition to downgrading the value of a lead-poisoned child’s IQ point to $1,500 because we should not transfer “wealth” from parents to children by asking parents to pay for their poisoned kids’ medical treatment, Randy Lutter has argued, in a seminal paper written for the American Enterprise Institute with his right-wing colleagues Kip Viscusi and Robert Hahn, that stringent health and safety regulations make people worse off because they make electricity, health care, and other life essentials more expensive. Lost from these elaborate calculations is any recognition that when people get sick from pollution, their care and their diminished quality of life are worth a lot of money, not to mention the important consideration that such protections are required by statutes passed by Congress and are not up for the reconsideration Lutter and his colleagues strongly urge.
Full textFor a number of days now, we’ve been hearing rumors that Cass Sunstein, President Obama’s “regulatory czar,” was on the verge of hiring conservative economist Randall Lutter to join him at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). Few personnel developments could be more discouraging to those hopeful that the Obama Administration will fulfill its many commitments to revitalize the agencies responsible for protecting public health, worker safety, and natural resources.
The best thing that can be said about the prospect of hiring Randall Lutter, a Cornell-educated economist who cut his teeth at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), is that he is a straightforward traditionalist. No “soft” or “humane” cost-benefit analysis for him, he likes his de-regulatory policy nice and raw. Lutter was the senior economist at the benighted Food and Drug Administration during the George W. Bush Administration, and now he brings his anti-regulatory toolbox to the epicenter of cost-benefit analysis, OIRA.
Ironically, the most glaring example in a long list of Lutter publications goes after one of the President’s most important, and often stated, regulatory priorities: safeguarding children, especially children of color, from the lurking dangers of toxic pollution, poor health care, and the grinding burden of poverty.
Full textThis morning, Toyota Motor Corporation announced it intends to replace accelerator pedals on about 3.8 million recalled vehicles in the United States because the pedals can get stuck in a floor mat. But the recall could still leave more than a million faulty cars on the road.
As I wrote earlier, there had been over 2,000 reports from the owners of Toyota cars that they have surged forward without warning reaching speeds of up to 100 miles per hour. NHTSA has investigated Toyota for runaway cars on eight separate occasions, but the agency only ordered two small recalls, which addressed floor mats and carpet panels. It is not apparent why the agency did not act more forcefully, and Congress should investigate that.
A problem with relying on recalls, as NHTSA often does to correct safety defects, is that not all vehicle owners will have the cars and trucks fixed. NHTSA indicates that the overall effectiveness of recalls is about 72%, which means Toyota will not fix about 1.1 million cars, assuming the average recall rate applies.
This is one reason why it is better if NHTSA requires manufacturers to design safe cars rather than waiting for defects to show up and instituting a recall. But this strategy does not work if the agency cannot anticipate a problem or it lacks the political will to issue a regulation for a problem that it does recognize. Congress should dig into this.
Full textPerhaps caught up in the spirit of the holiday shopping season, a large number of industry bargain hunters have been busy seeking great deals on regulatory relief at the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) in recent weeks. To be precise, the bureau hosted no fewer than 11 meetings with corporate interests regarding seven different regulatory issues between November 4 and November 16.
The meetings covered a range of topics. One meeting saw representatives of Shell Oil Company complaining about EPA’s proposed rule on fuel and fuel additives under the renewable fuel standards program mandated by the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act. In a second meeting, representatives of the beef and poultry industries met with OIRA officials to attack a proposed Department of Agriculture rule regarding nutritional labels for their products. Other meetings concerned NHTSA’s updated CAFÉ standards; EPA’s rule on hazardous pollutants generated by paint manufacturers; EPA’s rule on controlling ozone-depleting HCFC; and EPA’s attempts to update its NAAQSs for ozone, nitrogen dioxide, and sulfur dioxide.
By far the most popular topic, however, was EPA’s preliminary efforts to regulate coal combustion waste (coal ash). I blogged earlier about how the affected industries had already began putting on the full court press to oppose EPA, even though the agency hasn’t even proposed a rule yet. This press continued as affected industries have met with OIRA five more times to oppose EPA on this issue. (There have now been a total of seven meetings regarding coal combustion waste since October 16.)
We shall see if this will continue to be a busy shopping season at OIRA. The Obama OIRA ought to send all of these industry bargain hunters home empty handed.
Full textThe Obama Administration is expected to issue revisions to Executive Order 12,866, which specifies how the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) supervises federal regulatory agencies as they develop regulations to protect health, safety, the environment, and more (see the full comments on the matter submitted by CPR's board members in March).
CPR President Rena Steinzor and Board Member Rob Glicksman have issued a backgrounder on the coming Executive Order -- explaining the context and setting out six specific criteria on which to judge the Order. They are:
- Does the new EO continue to require agencies to justify proposed rules by quantifying “benefits” in dollar terms only – thus inviting agencies to ignore benefits that defy such monetization?
- Does the new EO continue to apply a “discount rate” to benefits of regulatory protections that won’t be realized for several years to come? And if it does apply a discount rate, is it set at the current rate of 7 percent, a number so high that future benefits from, for example, efforts to slow climate change essentially drop out of the equation after a couple of decades?
- Does the new EO explicitly disavow the “senior death discount” or other versions of lowering the value of a year of life if people are sick or handicapped?
- Does the new EO embrace – and to what extent – Sunstein’s attachment to “behavioral economics”? In particular, does it substitute warnings to citizens about potential harms for actual regulatory protection from harms? And does it rely on “willingness to pay” studies that peg the “benefits” of regulation to suspect data on how much people say, in the abstract, they are willing to pay to avoid certain harms.
- Does the new EO preserve OIRA’s power to “return” proposed regulations it does not like to agencies for time-consuming additional evaluation rather than simply advise agency heads that it disagrees with their judgments?
- Does the new EO impose transparency on OIRA’s activities, most significantly by ending OIRA’s practice of forcing regulatory agencies to meet with it behind closed doors and using those meetings to kill ideas for proposed regulations even before they are made public?
We'll have more, of course, when the Order is issued.
Full textThe National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) recently chastised the Toyota Motor Company for claiming that no defect existed in its cars, even while recalling 3.8 million of them. Toyota instituted the recall one month after a Lexus sedan suddenly accelerated out of control killing four people near San Diego. When Toyota blamed the problem on improperly installed floor mats, NHTSA said it expected the company to provide a “suitable vehicle solution.” The company then said that it was working on “vehicle-based remedies” for the problem.
Government regulators have two methods of promoting safer cars. NHTSA can adopt binding regulations requiring car manufacturers to adopt safety equipment, such as airbags. But Congress also authorized the agency to order a company to recall defective cars. In light of this authority, companies will voluntarily engage in a recall, as Toyota has done. According to news reports, there had been over 2,000 reports from the owners of Toyota cars that they have surged forward without warning reaching speeds of up to 100 miles per hour. NHTSA has investigated Toyota for runaway cars on eight separate occasions, but the agency only ordered two small recalls, which addressed floor mats and carpet panels. According to news reports, NHTSA has identified potential design defects in Toyota cars. Toyota maintains it was given a clean bill of health by the agency except for the floor mat problems.
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