By the Numbers: The Costs of New Regulatory Delays Announced in the Spring 2013 Regulatory Agenda
Perhaps caught up in the spirit of the holiday shopping season, a large number of industry bargain hunters have been busy seeking great deals on regulatory relief at the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) in recent weeks. To be precise, the bureau hosted no fewer than 11 meetings with corporate interests regarding seven different regulatory issues between November 4 and November 16.
The meetings covered a range of topics. One meeting saw representatives of Shell Oil Company complaining about EPA’s proposed rule on fuel and fuel additives under the renewable fuel standards program mandated by the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act. In a second meeting, representatives of the beef and poultry industries met with OIRA officials to attack a proposed Department of Agriculture rule regarding nutritional labels for their products. Other meetings concerned NHTSA’s updated CAFÉ standards; EPA’s rule …
When the Electric Power Research Institute (ERPI)—the research arm of the U.S. power industry—met with OIRA last month to discuss the various “beneficial uses” of spent coal ash from power plants, their timing was impeccable. Or so it would seem. On the day of the meeting, October 16, EPA submitted for OIRA review its pre-rule proposals regarding the regulation of coal ash disposal under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). In reality, the meeting demonstrates how eager regulated industries are to air their complaints to OIRA on rules they dislike, or in this case, expect to dislike. The industry’s lobbyists earned their paycheck this time around, getting in to see their traditional champions at OIRA to lay the groundwork for protesting a rule that has not yet even reached the notice-and-comment stage of rulemaking.
Coal ash comprises all the solid waste that …
Last month the National Research Council (NRC) released Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use. Properly understood, the NRC report is an admirable attempt to bring the consequences of energy use into sharp focus by putting those consequences into terms that are readily understandable by the general public. The NRC recognizes that the report is limited because it was unable to quantify and monetize all the impacts of energy production and use, thereby significantly understating their full costs. But the problem is worse: Even where the NRC did attempt to quantify and monetize the costs associated with energy, the methods that it used systematically understate the costs of those impacts.
According to the NRC report, the “cost” of energy production and use was at least $120 billion in 2005. The report reached this result by identifying and quantifying many of the impacts of …
Issues of national security have always enjoyed a free pass when it comes to the use of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) as the primary form of making decisions. For example, no military official or politician interested in keeping his job would ever dare publicly question whether the additional money spent on extra armor for tanks to keep soldiers safer could be put to better use somewhere else.
There are plenty of reasons why we are willing to accord national security decisions this special treatment. For one thing, as Ezra Klein noted recently, “we're uncomfortable subjecting military demands to traditional economic analysis.” Using CBA for military decisions necessarily puts us in a difficult ethical position: It seeks to prioritize the goal of “efficiency” over values that many Americans hold truly sacred, such as the duty of protecting the lives of our soldiers. These values often represent moral absolutes on …
Today, I joined CPR Member Scholars Mary Jane Angelo, Holly Doremus, and Dan Rohlf in submitting comments to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS)—one of the agencies charged with primary responsibility for executing the Endangered Species Act (ESA)—suggesting several ways to improve the regulations for implementing interagency consultations under the Act. Under Section 7 of the ESA, which governs interagency consultations, any time that a federal agency like the Department of Defense or the Department of Transportation wants to take an action that will potentially harm an endangered species or its habitat, that agency must consult with either FWS or the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS)—depending on what kind of species is involved—to determine whether and how the action will affect the species or its habitat. Through this consultation, the agency is supposed to determine how to alter its action to …
Earlier this month, representatives from the military and a number of defense contractors had a closed-door meeting with officials at OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). The topic under discussion was ostensibly a Safe Drinking Water Act regulation for perchlorate—a highly toxic chemical used in the manufacture of rocket fuel—that the EPA is currently considering. A closer look at the documents provided to OMB at the meeting suggests that the military officials and defense contractors had an even broader agenda in mind: making sure OMB continued to be a venue in which executive agencies affected by environmental, health, and safety regulations (what I will call “affected agencies”) can seek to interfere with or dilute those proposed regulations they find most inconvenient.
When it comes to environmental, health, and safety regulations, affected agencies—the Departments of Defense and Energy, in particular—are not all …
When President Obama launched his open government initiative on his first full day on the job, few assumed that the ambitious endeavor it contemplated would be easy. After all, lack of transparency and even active efforts to conceal information had become almost an inextricable feature of the federal government’s internal operations and decision-making—especially during the George W. Bush Administration. A recent series of developments confirms just how challenging the effort to achieve a more open government will be; fortunately, some of these developments also suggest that the Administration has learned some lessons from the initiatives’ early difficulties and perhaps is now moving in the right direction.
Obama launched the good ship “open government,” via a memorandum issued on January 21, laying out a vision of open government that was predicated on three pillars: transparency; public participation; and collaboration. The memo directed the Chief Technology Officer …
In 2007, the FDA came under criticism for failing to inform the public about studies it had had for two years which indicated that users of the diabetes drug Avandia faced up to a 42% greater chance of suffering a heart attack. More recently, it was revealed that Bush-era political appointees at the agency surreptitiously worked with chemical industry representatives to downplay evidence of the adverse health effects caused by bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical frequently used in making plastic toys and baby bottles. Thanks to scandals like these, the FDA has long been dogged by criticisms for the lack of transparency with which it conducts regulation.
The Obama Administration says it will be taking on the issue. The FDA announced Tuesday that it would be beginning a process to enhance “the transparency of the agency’s operations and decision-making process.”
To carry out this new initiative …
Last week I discussed how the institution of judicial review has been used to amplify the deregulatory nature of cost-benefit analysis. This week, I'll talk about some possible remedies.
An unusual synergy exists between the institutions of cost-benefit analysis and judicial review. Under most circumstances, the institution of judicial review is arguably neutral with regard to regulatory issues. When judicial review is applied to a case involving a regulation that has been weakened by cost-benefit analysis, however, the once neutral institution is transformed into one that that can have no other impact than to aid and abet the deregulatory agenda of cost-benefit analysis. This is because when an agency is forced by cost-benefit analysis to promulgate a rule that is too weak to be supported by the underlying statute, any public interest groups concerned with public health, safety, and the environment is left with a difficult decision …
