Whether it's raging wildfires in the West, catastrophic flooding in the East and Upper Midwest, or rising sea levels on the coasts, there is no question that climate change is affecting and will continue to significantly impact our public lands and the resources they both provide and protect. As a nation, we need to be prepared for these changes and find effective ways to adapt. 

To develop a snapshot of the scope and efficacy of such efforts thus far, we assessed the extent to which each of the four principal federal land management agencies – the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Bureau of Land Management – have (or have not) started preparing, whether through regulatory standards or otherwise, for the anticipated adverse impacts of climate change on the lands and resources under their jurisdictions. 

After surveying …

In an earlier post, CPR Member Scholar Robert Glicksman discussed the need for the next president to champion a truly positive vision of government and regulation. A new way of thinking and talking about these issues is critically important, and the president should play a key role in charting this course. 

While a rhetorical shift is important and long overdue, it is also crucial that the next president be prepared to match actions to words. Consequently, the next president should also commit to building a 21st century regulatory system, one that makes good on the promise of a positive vision of government by working to protect our health, safety, environment, and financial security. Continued political gridlock in Congress – if that's what the November election yields – will likely defeat timely and effective legislative responses to public threats of harm. Instead, if any such protections are to come …

When Congress extensively amended the Clean Air Act in 1970 to form the air pollution laws that we know today, it spoke in no uncertain terms about the breadth of federal authority in this area while also centrally involving states in the effort to clean up the nation's air. Congress directed the EPA Administrator to list the pollutants "which in his judgment" have "an adverse effect on public health and welfare" and are generated from "numerous or diverse" sources – pollutants known as "criteria" pollutants that threaten public health and the environment.1

To protect our health and the nation's valuable crops, buildings, and ecosystems, the EPA is required to establish maximum acceptable concentrations of these criteria air pollutants, and states have to write plans to keep them below those concentrations.2 If the plans do not meet the requirements of the law, Congress provided that …

Originally published on RegBlog by CPR Member Scholar Sidney Shapiro.

Although it is well known that regulatory capture can subvert the public interest, it is becoming increasingly clear that there are two forms of capture that can affect the performance of regulatory agencies.

The "old capture"—which is what most of us think of when we think of regulatory capture—occurs when regulators become so co-opted by the regulated entities or special interests they are supposed to regulate that they end up working to advance those interests instead of the public interest articulated in their statutory mission. In the "new capture," regulators attempt to serve the public interest, but they are stymied by procedural requirements that have gummed up the regulatory process and by deep budget cuts that make it more difficult to comply with those requirements. Both forms of capture subvert the public interest, but it …

This afternoon, the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform, Commercial, and Antitrust Law will hold an oversight hearing that looks at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), the powerful White House bureau that sits at the center of the regulatory universe. 

Originally created to oversee federal agencies' implementation of the Paperwork Reduction Act, a series of presidential executive orders stretching back to the Reagan administration has endowed OIRA with a powerful gatekeeping role over executive agencies' rulemaking output: no final rule of any consequence can see the light of day without OIRA's imprimatur. As CPR has documented for several years now, OIRA has generally wielded this power in an anti-regulatory fashion, typically working on behalf of politically connected industry lobbyists to block, delay, or dilute public safeguards. This pattern has held for presidential administrations from both parties. 

Headlining the hearing is OIRA …

The most important lessons can be the hardest to learn. Sometimes they even take a crisis. We can hope that the sorry saga of Flint, Michigan's lead-poisoned water will be such a teachable moment for at least some of the anti-government crowd, finally driving home the point that government has a vital role in protecting health and safety, and that it can only play it if it takes the responsibility seriously and is provided the wherewithal to do its job properly. 

President Barack Obama has often been a champion of active government of the sort that was missing in action in Flint. History will surely regard him that way, with health care reform, climate change regulation, the auto industry bailout, the 2009 stimulus bill, and Dodd-Frank on the list of examples. But as is so often the case, a closer look tells a more conflicted tale …

In a merits opinion issued on June 21, 2016, the U.S. District Court for the District of Wyoming (Judge Skavdahl) held that the U.S. Bureau of Land Management--the agency tasked with protecting and preserving federal lands for multiple uses by the public--lacks the authority to regulate hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") on federally-owned and managed lands. Using a Chevron step 1 analysis (one standard used to review agencies' interpretation of the meaning of statutes that grant agencies authority), the court finds that "Congress has directly spoken to the issue and precluded federal agency authority to regulate hydraulic fracturing," with the exception of fracturing that uses diesel fuels. The court bases this erroneous conclusion on the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA)--an Act that governs Environmental Protection Agency and state authority over underground water sources. Under the SDWA, entities that inject substances underground must first obtain a permit …