CPR's Buzbee to Set the Record Straight on WOTUS at Senate Hearing
This afternoon, the Fisheries, Water, and Wildlife Subcommittee of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will convene a hearing on a topic that is fast becoming the congressional conservative equivalent of talking about the weather: the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Clean Water Rule.
With the provocative title of "Erosion of Exemptions and Expansion of Federal Control – Implementation of the Definition of Waters of the United States," the hearing is unlikely to provide a sober or thoughtful forum for evaluating the rule's merits. Nevertheless, Center for Progressive Reform Member Scholar Bill Buzbee, who has been tracking this critical safeguard for several years, will do his best to keep the proceedings grounded in reality by offering testimony that rebuts the many "legally and factually erroneous" attacks that are now frequently made against the rule.
Corporate polluters and their allies in Congress have a knack for conjuring controversy out of thin air, and their campaign against the Clean Water Rule is a prime example. Once all the histrionics and hyperbole have been stripped away, what's left is a relatively straightforward and uncontroversial act of good government.
Drafted in response to a series of muddled U.S. Supreme Court decisions, the rule …
The growing problem of economic inequality in the United States continues to draw significant attention – and for good reason. By 2011, America's top 1 percent owned more than 40 percent of the nation's wealth, and ours ranks as one of the most unequal economies among developed countries. Meanwhile, the median wage rate for workers has remained largely unchanged in real terms over the last 40 years – even as worker productivity has grown at a steady clip – contributing to the largest gap in decades between high-wage earners and the rest of us.
Several critical legal, social, and political institutions play a role in contributing to and reinforcing the growing chasm that separates the wealthy few from the rest of us. One that is overlooked, but no less important, is the U.S. regulatory system.
When working properly, the regulatory system implements safeguards that help ensure that …
These days, it seems a week doesn't go by without some conservative advocacy group releasing a new study that purports to measure the total annual costs of federal regulation. In this case, it's literally true. Last week, the reliably anti-regulatory Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) put out its annual tally, provocatively titled "Ten Thousand Commandments," which this year finds a total cost of $1.885 trillion for 2015. And the week before that, the just-as-reliably anti-regulatory Mercatus Center published a report that concludes that federal regulations cost $4 trillion in 2012.
To make things more confusing, these studies follow the same basic two-part template. First, they include only the cost side of the ledger, ignoring the huge benefits that federal regulations produce by protecting people and the environment against unacceptable harms. No reasonable policy evaluation would take such a misguided approach, and the decision to ignore …
Once upon a time, congressional conservatives pretended to care about the appearance, if not the reality, of corruption afflicting the federal budgeting process. Strangely, they chose to act on their sanctimonious outrage by banning earmarks – or legislative instructions that direct federal agencies to spend appropriated funds on certain specified projects – while leaving the much greater problem of "limitations riders" intact. These riders essentially function as the reverse of earmarks by prohibiting federal agencies from spending appropriated funds on certain specified projects, and today, they are typically used to block public safeguards at the behest of powerful corporate interests.
Last year, I published a report along with CPR Member Scholars Tom McGarity and Richard Murphy that examined the growing problem of anti-regulatory limitation riders in the current Republican-controlled Congress. To highlight this problem, we looked at the then-pending Fiscal Year 2016 Interior and Environment Appropriations bills moving through …
Center for Progressive Reform Member Scholar Joel Mintz submitted written testimony to the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform, Commercial, and Antitrust Law ahead of its hearing this morning on yet another ill-advised bill, the misleadingly named "Stop Settlement Funds Slush Funds Act of 2016." The bill would place arbitrary limits on how the federal government can use funds it obtains through settlement agreements that arise from enforcement actions brought against companies that have violated federal laws and the regulations that implement them.
Mintz's testimony focuses on one particularly harmful effect this bill would have: its restrictions on the ability of agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to include Supplemental Environmental Programs (SEPs) as part of the settlement agreements it reaches for violations of environmental laws like the Clean Water Act or the Clean Air Act. As he explains, the EPA's SEPs …
Several weeks ago, Sen. Elizabeth Warren delivered perhaps the most important speech on the U.S. regulatory system in recent memory at a forum on regulatory capture organized by the Administrative Conference of the United States. In it, she described how the regulatory system was not working for the people as it should be – or as Congress had intended. Instead, she described how corporate influence over the regulatory process has become so far-reaching and so overwhelming that it has become fundamentally "tilted" to generate results that favor corporate profit at the expense of crucial safeguards necessary for protecting people and the environment.
Put differently, Warren's speech described how corporate interests had gone beyond capturing discrete agencies – a phenomenon that policymakers and political scientists have recognized for decades – and now have successfully captured critical components of the process by which agencies do their work.
This new approach …
Over the last few years, deregulatory advocates have pursued a well-trodden path for advancing their anti-safeguard agenda: Publish a large, glossy "study," replete with impressive mathiness, that purports to measure the impacts of regulation but in fact provides a highly skewed portrayal by consciously ignoring the many benefits that regulations provide. (For example, see here, here, and here.) Last week, the libertarian Mercatus Center did the latest trodding when it released a study that ranked all 50 states (and the District of Columbia) according to how "affected" they are by federal regulation. The usual gloss and mathiness were on full display, but as always, an indispensable guest was left off the invite list: regulatory benefits.
So, how does the Mercatus Center come up with its rankings? It starts with its RegData dataset, which claims to measure total regulatory impact on the economy by – no joke – counting up …
Over the weekend, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released the final draft of its annual report on the costs and benefits of federal regulation, which purports to provide a reasonably complete picture of the total impact that federal regulations have on the U.S. economy. This year’s final report finds that federal regulations generated total benefits in the range of $216 billion to $812 billion (in 2001 dollars; in 2010 dollars, the range recalculates to $261 billion to $981 billion) while imposing total costs in the range $57 billion to $85 billion (in 2001 dollars; in 2010 dollars, the range recalculates to $68 billion to $103 billion). According to the report, then, federal regulations make society better off, and significantly so, producing total net benefits in the range of $131 billion to $755 billion (in 2001 dollars; in 2010 dollars, the net …
CPR Vice President Sid Shapiro is among the many distinguished panelists participating this monring in a forum called "Regulatory Capture in the 21st Century." The forum is hosted by the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), an independent federal agency that works to provide Congress with advice on improving the administrative system. The event will feature remarks from Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Mike Lee (R-UT).
Professor Shapiro will participate in a panel that looks at regulatory capture in the federal rulemaking process. Hehas written extensively on regulatory capture, and testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the subject in 2010. A second panel will look at how regulatory capture impacts agency enforcement actions.
The forum runs from 9:30 am to 12:00 noon in Room 106 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building.
Yesterday, the Republican members of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee (HSGAC)—the Senate committee with primary oversight jurisdiction over the regulatory system—published a report detailing their shock and dismay over a Wall Street Journal story alleging that the White House "may have inappropriately influenced" the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) so-called "net neutrality" rule. In releasing the report, Committee Chairman Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) could barely contain his contempt: "It is concerning that an independent agency like the FCC could be so unduly influenced by the White House, particularly on an issue that touches the lives of so many Americans and has such a significant impact on a critical sector of the United States economy."
Among other things, the Senate HSGAC report complains about what it describes as secret communications between White House staff and FCC staff about how the rule should be …
