The White House today announced the departure of Cass Sunstein, Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. CPR President Rena Steinzor issued the following statement:  

Cass Sunstein brought impressive credentials and a personal relationship with the President to his job as Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. But in the final analysis, Sunstein has continued the Bush Administration’s tradition of using the office to block needed health and safety protections disliked by big business and political contributors. Worse, the narrative that Sunstein helped craft about the impact of regulations on American life — that regulatory safeguards are fundamentally suspect — was discordant with the rest of the President's agenda and the arguments he makes for his reelection.

Sunstein’s departure is an opportunity for the Administration to reset its regulatory policy and embrace public health and safety protections that have …

Talk about trying to fix the wrong problem: Senators Mark Warner, Rob Portman, and Susan Collins have introduced a bill today that seeks to move the rulemaking process further away from agency experts and transparency and more toward hidden corners of the White House, where well-heeled industries can buy access and push political operatives to block rules.

The bill at hand is the Independent Agency Regulatory Analysis Act. In a press release and accompanying fact sheet today, the senatorial trio – one conservative Democrat, one potential Republican VP nominee, and a once-moderate Republican who has changed her stripes – boast how the bill seeks to bring the “independent agencies” under the purview of the White House.  Those agencies include the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, both of which have great potential to exasperate the big bankers and security brokers who bankroll elections …

CPR Member Scholar John Knox has been appointed the U.N. Human Rights Council’s first Independent Expert on Human Rights and the Environment.

The position was created in March with a mandate to study the relationship of human rights and the environment, and prepare a series of reports to the Human Rights Council over the next three years. The mission will be to “identify, promote and exchange views on best practices relating to the use of human rights obligations and commitments to inform, support and strengthen environmental policymaking, especially in the area of environmental protection.”

Knox has published extensively on the intersection of human rights and the environment, and co-authored the CPR white paper Reclaiming Global Environmental Leadership: Why the United States Should Ratify Ten Pending Environmental Treaties, published earlier this year. He is a professor at Wake Forest University School of Law, and has been …

President Obama issued the latest salvo in the Administration's efforts to placate the business community this morning, in the form of a new Executive Order called “Identifying and Reducing Regulatory Burdens.”   The Order would expand and enhance the unfunded mandate that would require agencies to scour through the rule books, finding “excessive” rules that would save regulated companies big money. As I have written elsewhere in this space, the latest example of such an effort would jeopardize food safety by allowing huge poultry processors to self-inspect for salmonella, not incidentally making the lot of the workers who are already overburdened by workplace safety hazards close to intolerable.

The new order sugarcoats its regressive mandate by instructing agencies to seek “public comment”  on regulatory “look-backs,” which in practice does not mean comments from mom and pop, who are unlikely to spend their spare time on regulations.gov …

Electoral politics or public policy? Policy or politics? One ripe example of how the White House rides herd on health and safety agencies, thinking about politics, not policy to determine what they should do, is provided by the latest poster child for curbing allegedly “excessive rules”: a U.S. Department of Agriculture proposal to take federal inspectors off the lines at poultry processing plants and substitute inspections by workers who would simultaneously cope with a speed-up on the line from 90 to 175 birds/minute.

According to White House regulatory czar Cass Sunstein, regulatory decisions made in the name of the President are based on an objective consideration of the merits of health and safety rules, and he has the paperwork to prove it. Executive Order 12,866, Executive Order 13563, Circular A-4, and a wad of memoranda intone just what kinds of detailed analyses agencies are …

By CPR President Rena Steinzor and Media Manager Ben Somberg

Internal EPA emails obtained by CPR through a FOIA request reveal EPA officials’ frustration regarding the White House’s efforts to triangulate House Republicans’ ferocious attacks on regulations. A White House letter last year emphasizing regulatory costs but barely describing the lives saved and injuries avoided by strong protections angered environmental and public health advocates.  The newly released emails show that top EPA officials – who were not even consulted – were also not pleased.

On August 26 of last year, Speaker of the House John Boehner sent President Obama a letter requesting that the Administration provide a list of “planned new rules that would have an estimated economic impact of more than $1 billion.” The goal, of course, was to continue the GOP’s focus on the costs of regulations (the headline of Boehner’s press release: “Citing …

Yesterday evening, when press coverage had ebbed for the day, the Department of Labor issued a short, four-paragraph press release announcing it was withdrawing a rule on child labor on farms. The withdrawal came after energetic attacks by the American Farm Bureau, Republicans in Congress, Sarah Palin, and—shockingly—Al Franken (D-MN).

Last year, Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis said: "Children employed in agriculture are some of the most vulnerable workers in America.” “Ensuring their welfare is a priority of the department, and this proposal is another element of our comprehensive approach."

The Administration pledged to protect young workers in dangerous jobs, and now they’ve thrown that pledge out the window.

Yesterday, the Administration said this:

“The Obama administration is firmly committed to promoting family farmers and respecting the rural way of life, especially the role that parents and other family members play in passing those …

With considerable media flourish, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Tuesday the first and so far only criminal charges related to the BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe that killed 11 workers, and did profound violence to the Gulf of Mexico and the local economies dependent up on it. One Kurt Mix, 50, an engineer involved in designing the failed “top kill” remedy, was indicted for obstruction of justice. More specifically, he's accused of deleting text messages from his phone that he knew were to be collected as evidence in the case.. 

Prosecutors made Mix do a perp walk for reporters, with the New York Times reporting that he “surrendered” in Houston, “wearing a light purple shirt and pair of khakis without a belt.”  Several legal experts, including Professors  Richard Lazarus (former executive director of the Oil Spill Commission) and David Uhlmann (former chief DOJ environmental crimes prosecutor …

The White House’s Cass Sunstein has found another poster child for his crusade to eliminate costly regulation under President Obama's Executive Order 13563.  The order requires agencies and departments to “look back” at existing requirements in order to kill unnecessary health, safety, and environmental requirements.  The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), complying dutifully with the order, has dug deep into the garbage can where abandoned deregulatory proposals go to die, producing a despicable plan regarding  poultry processing plants, already among the most hazardous workplaces in the nation.  The proposed rollback would make corporate owners rather than federal inspectors responsible for scrutinizing slaughtered carcasses to ensure they are free of blood, guts, and (euphemistically) “fecal matter.”  The new rule would save the federal government about $39 million annually—a small amount that accounts for the savings at USDA when a few hundred inspectors are offloaded …