Ryan Record on Regulation Includes Voting to Gut Clean Air Act Protections Adopted in Bipartisan 401 to 25 Vote
The Vice Presidential debate is tonight, and I suspect that, among other things, we’ll hear Paul Ryan give some general talk of “reducing red tape” or “reducing government burdens on job creators.” We probably won’t hear a pitch for blocking air pollution rules that would save thousands of lives—which, after all, doesn’t poll well. But that’s exactly what Ryan has voted for, over and over.
Representative Ryan’s record on regulations and the environment has received relatively little attention outside an initial burst in the environmental press, probably because he’s pitched himself on his budget, and has no real environmental initiatives specifically to his name. (Note that his extreme budget proposal, which would slash federal discretionary spending, would devastate the federal agencies charged with protecting the public—though of course we don’t get to hear the specifics, which would be quite unpopular).
What hasn’t gotten much attention, though, is the dozens of times that Ryan has voted to limit agencies’ ability to carry out their statutory mission of protecting people and the environment—most notably his repeated votes to undo critical provisions of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments. If enacted, these …
Today, the EPA announced its new proposed National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) for fine particulate matter, commonly referred to as soot. Soot is one of the most common air pollutants that Americans encounter, and it is extremely harmful to our health and the environment, contributing to premature death, heart attacks, and chronic lung disease. Today’s proposal is a significant step forward that will bring tremendous benefits for the public if and when it is finalized.
The proposal comprises two parts—an annual standard and a daily standard. EPA is proposing to maintain the daily standard of 35 micrograms per cubic meter of air (hereafter “micrograms”), while lowering the annual standard from 15 micrograms to within the range of 12 to 13 micrograms. Significantly, this proposal is consistent with the recommendation of the EPA’s scientists, which was endorsed by the Clean Air Science Advisory Committee …
Last December, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) finalized a new aviation safety rule designed to prevent excessive pilot fatigue, a problem that had contributed to at least one high-profile airline disaster—the Colgan Air Flight 3407 crash near Buffalo, New York, in February of 2009, which killed 50 and injured four—as well as to a disturbing series of mishaps and “near misses.”
It turns out that the rule took a mid-flight detour on its journey from proposal to final form, and that the way in which it was weakened along the way is a textbook example of how the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs manages, at the behest of industry, to override the plain meaning of statutes requiring regulation. The proposal, issued for public comment in September 2010, covered cargo-only pilots as well as passenger pilots. That made a certain sense, because while …
Inside EPA is reporting that yet another critical EPA rulemaking is now being delayed indefinitely. This time it’s the agency’s rulemaking to codify a draft guidance clarifying whether Clean Water Act protections apply to wetlands and other marginal waters.
EPA had projected on its online rulemaking gateway that it expected to issue a proposed rule this month. In the recent Issue Alert that CPR President Rena Steinzor and I wrote, we were skeptical about this deadline, because the EPA has not yet even sent a draft proposal to the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) for centralized review—a process that often takes several months, and in some cases well over a year.
The Inside EPA article notes that the EPA’s rulemaking gateway was changed at some point since March 5th, so that it now provides no deadline for issuing a …
In its public meeting records, the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) frequently misspells the names or affiliations of the attendees. Senator Jon Kyl was once listed as “Sen. Rul.” And John Ikerd, affiliated with the University of Missouri (MO) and the Sierra Club, was listed as “John Ikend, University of MD/Siemen Club.”
Sometimes the misspelled names or affiliations are easy to figure out; other times they aren’t (see page 77 of our OIRA white paper from November for more examples). The public is supposed to be able to tell who these people are – that’s the whole point, transparency.
The misspellings are troublesome, but a new OIRA meeting record I just noticed takes the cake for leaving the public uninformed:
Why list the affiliation of the attendees at all?!
The occasional typo is one thing, but when OIRA gets it …
Soon after assuming office in January 2009, President Obama promised that, in contrast to George W. Bush, science and law would be the two primary guiding stars for regulatory decision-making during his administration. From that perspective then, the finalized version of the EPA’s ozone standard should have been a no-brainer. After all, the standard was intended to replace the 2008 one issued in the dying days of the Bush Administration, which EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has slammed as legally and scientifically indefensible. The Clean Air Act charges the EPA to set the ozone standard at a level that is protective of human health with an adequate margin of safety, and, consistent with this mandate and with the unanimous recommendation of the EPA’s blue ribbon clean air science advisors for how to achieve this mandate, the agency seem poised to set the new standard somewhere between …
What would you do if a report you funded was debunked by a scathing critique from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service? What if you found that the researchers you funded had based 70 percent of their analysis of the costs of regulation on a regression based on opinion polling data? What if the researchers who had published that opinion polling insisted publicly that their data was never meant to be used for such purposes? What if a member of Congress had publicly lambasted you for keeping the underlying data used in the study from being examined by the public?
For the Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy, the answer appears to be: Stay the Course. In new research proposal requests I noticed recently posted on the SBA’s website, the SBA appears to have learned little.
The Office of Advocacy’s flawed report that got so …
House Republicans are fond of accusing the Obama Administration of trying to “regulate when it cannot legislate.” With a slight modification, a similar accusation can be hurled at House Republicans: They are trying to appropriate when they cannot legislate. This accusation has the benefit of actually being true.
The Fiscal Year 2012 appropriations bill for the EPA and the Department of Interior, currently being debated in the People’s House, is loaded down with dozens of anti-environment and anti-public safety policy riders. Several of these riders are virtually identical to bills that have been considered or are being considered in the House, but which have no chance of passing the Senate or surviving a presidential veto. These riders include a measure that prohibits the EPA from regulating coal ash as a hazardous waste (Section 434), blocks the EPA’s efforts to regulate greenhouse gases (Section 431), exempts …
In testimony before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs in mid-April, Cass Sunstein, Administrator of the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), was asked to comment on a much-disputed $1.75 trillion estimate of the annual cost of federal regulations. The number comes from a report commissioned by the Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy, often referred to as the Crain and Crain report, for its authors. The $1.75 trillion estimate is grossly at odds with OIRA’s own calculations, but it has been widely bandied about by anti-regulatory advocates on the Hill. Sunstein might well have been expected to knock the question out of the park back in April, but the bat never left his shoulder. “I haven’t studied that document with care,” he said (see 63:50 – 66:43 in the video archive of the …
Before the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, before the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and before the Upper Big Branch mine disaster, there was the TVA coal ash spill in Kingston, Tennessee. It was at Kingston, during the early morning hours on December 22, 2008, that an earthen dam holding back a 40-acre surface impoundment burst, releasing one billion gallons of inky sludge. The Kingston coal ash spill taught the American public about the catastrophic costs that can accompany so many types of large scale energy development; its aftermath continues to teach us that instituting the necessary reforms for protecting people and the environment against similar catastrophes in the future doesn’t come easy or quick.
Today marks the one-year anniversary since the EPA released its proposed rule for controlling the disposal of coal ash, a toxic byproduct of burning coal to produce energy that …
