Transparency Withdrawn: A New Tactic for Shielding OIRA's Regulatory Review Activities?
Yesterday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that it was “withdrawing” from White House review its draft final guidance that sought to clarify the scope of the Clean Water Act. The guidance had been languishing at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), which oversees the White House regulatory review process, for 575 days, even though Executive Order 12866, the document that governs OIRA review of regulations, caps the length of reviews at 90 days plus a limited, one-time extension of 30 days. This is just the latest episode in what now appears to be a new disturbing trend: The Obama Administration seems to be increasingly relying on a relatively uncommon practice known as a “withdrawal” to unceremoniously dispose of long-overdue OIRA reviews involving important safeguards that are vigorously opposed by industry.
Over the last few months, several other industry-opposed rules have met a similar fate of being withdrawn after sitting at OIRA for well beyond the time limit permitted by Executive Order 12866:
·The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) draft final rule mandating rearview cameras to prevent back-over accidents involving children: “Withdrawn” from regulatory review on June 20, 2013, after collecting dust at the OIRA for …
Last week, Regulatory Czar Howard Shelanski embarked on his maiden voyage into the glamorous world of White House blogging, penning a post that touts the latest burden-reducing accomplishment of President Obama’s dubious regulatory “look-back” initiative. On this auspicious occasion, he trumpets the Department of Transportation’s (DOT) proposed rulemaking to reduce the number of inspection reports that commercial truck drivers have to file, resulting in reduced paperwork burden costs to the tune of $1.7 billion annually.
Shelanski makes clear in the post that this DOT rulemaking is not an isolated incident, but is in fact part of the regulatory look-back initiative’s broader antiregulatory project. He explains that the initiative is necessary because “some regulations that were well crafted when first issued can become unnecessary over time as conditions change—and regulations that aren’t providing real benefits to society need to be streamlined, modified …
Tomorrow, a new panel in the Senate Judiciary Committee—the Subcommittee on Oversight, Federal Rights, and Agency Action—will bring some much-need sanity to the discussion of federal regulatory policy when it holds a hearing entitled “Justice Delayed: The Human Cost of Regulatory Paralysis.” What’s so refreshing about this hearing is that it starts from the premise that blocked and delayed safeguards are a problem that needs to be solved.
Crucially, this hearing will provide an opportunity to shine a light on the costs that are imposed on the public when regulations aimed at protecting people and the environment are unnecessarily delayed. These costs represent real harm to real people—and they are by definition preventable.
Previously, in this space, I examined the costs to the public that would result from the new delays to three rules that were announced in the Spring 2013 Regulatory Agenda …
Earlier this week, Regulatory Czar Howard Shelanski testified before the House Small Business committee to update committee members on the progress the Obama Administration has made with the regulatory look-back process established by Executive Orders 13563 and 13610. In one interesting exchange with Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-Mo.), Shelanski offered the following perspective on the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs’ (OIRA) approach to regulatory review:
The interpretation of an agency’s statute and the choice of policy—to the extent there is discretion under that statute—is in the first instance in the province of the department or agency that is issuing the regulations. OIRA doesn’t set policy priorities or do the initial legal interpretations for the agencies. They do that.
(Skip ahead the 20:00-minute mark of the hearing.)
If true, this statement from Shelanski would represent a dramatic shift in how OIRA sees its …
“April showers bring May flowers.” To that well-known spring-related proverb one might soon add “the Spring Regulatory Agenda brings new groundless complaints from corporate interests and their anti-regulatory allies in Congress about so-called regulatory overreach.” Last Wednesday, the Obama Administration issued the 2013 edition of the Spring Regulatory Agenda, one of two documents the President must issue every year (the other is published in the fall) that compiles and summarizes the various regulatory actions that the Administration expects to take in the near future. Over the past few years, regulatory opponents have grown fond of pointing to the Spring and Fall Regulatory Agendas as still further evidence of the so-called “regulatory tsunami” that is allegedly hindering the economy and to support their campaign to “reform” our regulatory system. I expect that these same groups will waste little time in the coming days to misrepresent the latest regulatory …
Welcome aboard, Administrator Shelanski. You’re already well into your first week on the job as the head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). You’ve already received plenty of valuable advice—during your confirmation hearing and from the pages of this blog, among other places—on how you can transform OIRA’s role in the regulatory system so that it’s not a continued impediment to effective government. For example, many have urged you to end the pattern of long-overdue reviews at OIRA (at last count, 72 of the 137 rules undergoing review are past the 90-day limit provided for in Executive Order 12866), to improve transparency of OIRA’s reviews so that decision-makers can be held publicly accountable for changes they make to pending safeguards, and to restrict the use of cost-benefit analysis as a means for justifying the dilution …
Yesterday's confirmation hearing for Dr. Howard Shelanski—President Barack Obama’s nominee to serve as the next “Regulatory Czar,” or Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA)—may have been the “most important hearing in Washington this week,” but it did not produce much in the way of bombshells or drama. Rather, it was a relatively staid affair, which at times had a distinct “going through the motions” vibe.
On the positive side, the hearing generated some good discussion about the problems associated with OIRA’s role in the rulemaking process. Several of the questions posed by Chairman Carper (D-DE) and Senator Levin (D-MI) were very thoughtful. Senator Levin described the excessive rule delays at OIRA as “chronic” and asked what the nominee would do to address them. He also touched on the problems of extending OIRA review to independent regulatory …
Earlier this week, Karen Mills, the current Administrator of the Small Business Administration (SBA), announced her intention to leave office, opening up another second-term vacancy for President Obama to fill in the coming months. The SBA position is unlikely to attract as much media attention or pundit speculation as the EPA or Energy Interior posts, but it could have a big impact on whether the Obama Administration is able to take on the long to-do list of public health, safety, and environmental challenges that the nation currently faces. The next SBA Administrator can and should begin the critical process of reshaping the controversial SBA Office of Advocacy so that it focuses on helping truly small businesses, without undermining regulatory safeguards.
A recent CPR white paper I co-authored examined how the Office of Advocacy uses federal tax dollars to try to block health, safety, and environmental regulations, often …
Yesterday, the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) finalized the long overdue Pattern of Violations rule, a measure that will enhance the agency’s enforcement authority by making it easier for the agency to hold scofflaw mines strictly accountable for repeatedly and needlessly putting their workers at risk of chronic illness, severe injury, or even death. The deterrent effect of this enhanced enforcement authority will discourage delinquent mine operators from cutting corners on health and safety, a development that will produce significant benefits for America’s miners. MSHA estimates (see page 6) that the rule will prevent nearly 1,800 non-fatal injuries over the next 10 years, in addition to reducing instances of illnesses and fatalities.
The Pattern of Violations rule was one of the high priority regulatory actions that MSHA announced in response to 2010’s Upper Big Branch Mine disaster, in which 29 miners were …
Internal EPA emails obtained by CPR though a FOIA request reveals that representatives from one or more of the EPA’s peer agencies second-guessed a critical scientific finding undergirding the EPA’s then-pending draft final rule to tighten the ozone standard, claiming that ozone is not associated with mortality impacts. The EPA’s final proposal rightly disregarded the unsound comments and included information on how reducing ozone pollution saves lives. The rule, estimated to save thousands of lives, was later blocked by the White House. The email provides a rare glimpse at how peer agencies abuse the interagency commenting process by attacking other agencies’ rules—often on matters on which they have comparatively little expertise.
In the August 3, 2011, email, sent while the draft final rule was still undergoing review at the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), Karen Martin, an EPA scientist …
