A clock hangs in Room 342 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building—the room where tomorrow at 10:00 am the Republican leadership of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee will convene its first antiregulatory circus hearing of the new Congress.  Below that clock, the hearing will play out according to a now-familiar script:  the Republican members will cite vague constituent concerns about the regulatory system harming their families and businesses; the three industry shills invited by the majority will rehash the same tired and unsubstantiated arguments about how regulations are a drain on the economy; and, by the hearing’s end, a consensus will emerge among the Republican members and their hand-picked witnesses that drastic reforms of the regulatory system are in order.  Along the way, hands will be wrung, fists will be pounded, and vitriol will be spewed.  Something must be done, they …

Last week, Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) continued the parade of anti-regulatory bills resurrected from past sessions of Congress by introducing in their respective chambers the Sunshine for Regulatory Decrees and Settlements Act of 2015 (SRDSA).  While all of these anti-regulatory bills are categorically terrible, the SRDSA really needs to be singled out for special condemnation.  After all, it is the only one of the lot that purports to take on a problem—so-called “sue and settle” litigation—that no less than the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has debunked as a myth.  Nevertheless, Messrs. Collins and Grassley have pressed ahead with the bill—versions of which they introduced previously in 2013—despite the pressing real problems confronting their constituents and our country.

It has long been an article of faith among conservative lawmakers that agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) convene …

At last, the Obama Administration is articulating a sense of urgency about moving vitally needed health and safty regulations through its pipeline. Here’s Howard Shelanski, White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, in a Bloomberg BNA story this week:

“So we are working now, here in January of 2015, on getting priorities lined up, so that we do not find ourselves at some point in 2016 with really important policy priorities unexecuted,” Shelanski said.

Later in the interview:

Still, the reason OIRA is working hard with agencies in early 2015 is so they can bring the most important rules through the process this year and finalize them sometime in early 2016, Shelanski said.

It’s about time. Last November, CPR released an Issue Alert calling on the Obama Administration to seize the opportunity offered by its remaining time in office and complete a slate of …

According to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs’ (OIRA) records, the Department of Transportation submitted its draft final crude-by-rail safety rule for White House review late last week.  OIRA’s review of draft final rules represents the last hurdle in what can be a long and resource-intensive rulemaking process; just about any rule of consequence cannot take effect without OIRA’s final approval.  Once completed, the crude-by-rail rulemaking would help to avoid train derailments and crashes involving the more than 415,000 rail-carloads of flammable crude oil traveling across the United States each year, and to minimize the consequences of such catastrophes if and when they do occur.  A recent CPR Issue Alert featured the rulemaking as among the essential 13 regulatory actions that the Obama Administration should commit to completing during its remaining time in office.

OIRA’s centralized review can be a highly contentious …

While meteorologists’ recent doom-laden predictions of an apocalyptic blizzard hitting the mid-Atlantic may not have exactly panned out, I have a forecast that you can take to the bank:  A large mass of conservative hot air has recently moved into the Washington, DC, region where it is now combining with a high pressure zone of intense industry lobbying.  As a result, we can expect over the next several days a heavy downpour of bills aimed at eviscerating our nation’s regulatory safety net with long-lasting, if not irreversible, damage to the public health, financial security, and the environment.  The powerful corporate interests that find compliance with these safeguards to be inconvenient to their bottom lines, however, stand to reap a windfall from this storm if any of these bills are enacted into law.

I have already highlighted one of these bills—the Small Business Regulatory Flexibility Improvements …

Just as The Sixth Sense makes more sense when you realize that Bruce Willis’s character has been dead the whole time, the Small Business Regulatory Flexibility Improvements Act (SBRFIA)—the latest antiregulatory bill being championed by antiregulatory members of the House of Representatives—makes more sense when you realize that it has nothing to do with helping small businesses at all.  Rather, it’s all about helping powerful corporate interests increase their profits at the expense of public health, safety, and the environment.   The twist ending to this nightmare of a bill is that real small businesses—the very entities the bill’s sponsors claim to be helping—are left in a worse position than if the bill were never enacted at all.

Conservative members of Congress have long pretended to care about small businesses—at least, insofar as it helps advance their broader antigovernment campaign …

Today, Rep. Fred Upton and the rest of his anti-environmental allies on the House Energy and Commerce Committee are probably suffering from a stingingbout of buyers' remorse as the Government Accountability Office report they requested didn't deliver the answer they were seeking.   The Commerce Committee hoped to demonstrate that “In many instances, EPA has entered into settlements or consent decrees committing the agency to undertake significant new rule-makings subject to specific timelines or schedules, including rule-makings that may result in substantial new compliance costs.” Instead, what they got was the truth. Settlement agreements are rarely used.  When they are used, they are simply requiring the Agency to complete a rule it is already mandated to complete by Congress. The timing of the report is impeccable as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Thomas Donohue spent a great deal of time this morning railing against …

Over the next two weeks, CPR will publish a series of blog posts highlighting several key regulatory safeguards for protecting the integrity and health of U.S. water bodies against damaging pollution—rules that are currently under development by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and included in our recent Issue Alert, Barack Obama’s Path to Progress in 2015-16: Thirteen Essential Regulatory Actions.  Today’s post will examine the clean water safeguard that has attracted perhaps the most vociferous opposition from industrial and agricultural polluters along with their antiregulatory allies in Congress: the EPA’s pending rule to clarify the definition of “Waters of the United States” under the Clean Water Act, which seeks to ensure that certain classes of critical water bodies—many of which are smaller and often overlooked—receive the statute’s full protections.

Given all the histrionics and overblown exaggerations from industry, it …