At Small Business Hearing, CPR's Ristino Will Connect the Dots between Strong Safeguards and Strong Small Farms
This morning, CPR Member Scholar and Vermont Law School Professor Laurie Ristino will testify at a hearing before the Subcommittee on Agriculture, Energy, and Trade of the House Small Business Committee. The majority's not-so-subtle objective for the hearing is to apply familiar conservative talking points against federal regulations to the specific context of small farms.
In contrast to the subcommittee majority's three witnesses, all of whom represent industry trade associations that have strongly criticized environmental and other regulations in the past, Ristino's testimony offers a fuller account of the relationship between regulatory safeguards and the economic health of small and mid-sized farms. Indeed, in her testimony, Ristino effectively makes the case that a robust system of environmental, food safety, and worker protections help to provide fertile ground in which small and mid-sized farms can thrive.
We can expect the majority and its three witnesses to spend much of the hearing focused on a not-so-skeptical tallying of the "costs" side of the ledger. Fortunately, Ristino will be there to remind the subcommittee about the myriad benefits that regulations generate. Her testimony does this by making the following three points:
- Regulations impacting agriculture deliver critical public benefits in the form of contaminant-free …
Tuesday afternoon, three CPR Member Scholars – William Buzbee, Lisa Heinzerling, and Rena Steinzor – will be among the experts featured at a major symposium on the threats facing our system of regulatory safeguards. The symposium, The War on Regulation: Good for Corporations, Bad for the Public, was organized by the Coalition of Sensible Safeguards (CSS), which CPR co-leads as an executive committee member, and will include a keynote address from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and closing remarks from Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh.
The goal of the symposium is to shine a spotlight on the concerted attacks being launched against our regulatory system during the Trump era, both from the Trump administration and conservatives in Congress. In addition to Senator Warren’s and Attorney General Frosh’s remarks, the War on Regulation symposium will include two panel-led discussions. The first will feature Professor Heinzerling and will examine the …
Yesterday, six senators, led by Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, criticized Trump administration "regulatory czar" Neomi Rao and her office for what appears to have been a slapdash review of a highly controversial Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) draft policy designed to stifle the agency's progress on advancing environmental and public health protections. Rao is the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), a small but powerful bureau located within the Executive Office of the President. For nearly four decades, OIRA has enjoyed broad and largely unchecked authority to interfere in pending rulemakings and to secretly quash or water down those measures that might be politically inconvenient for the president.
In a letter to Administrator Rao, the senators identified several irregularities with OIRA's review of EPA's proposed rule on the use of science to inform regulatory policy. Taken together, these irregularities suggest …
Over the last couple of weeks, conservatives in Congress have continued their assault on public safeguards using the once-obscure and once-dormant Congressional Review Act (CRA). If their latest adventure succeeds, it will be the 16th public protection that these members, working with in concert with President Donald Trump, have obliterated over the last year, laying waste to a broad and diverse range of measures related to public health, safety, the environment, and consumer financial protection.
The anti-safeguard lawmakers behind these CRA-fueled attacks have already demonstrated what a dangerous law the CRA is, especially in the wrong hands, but this latest action would take the law to an unprecedented and even more extreme level. It targets a 2013 "bulletin" by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) aimed at discriminatory auto lending practices. As such, this would be the first time the CRA has been used to wipe out …
Tomorrow, anti-environmental members of the House Natural Resources Committee will hold a hearing provocatively titled, "The Weaponization of the National Environmental Policy Act and the Implications of Environmental Lawfare" – yet another in a long line of conservatives' attempts to justify myriad legislative attacks against this bedrock environmental law. As more than 100 CPR Member Scholars and other academic leaders explain in a letter to committee members, though, the hearing would be more aptly titled "The Mythification of NEPA."
The apparent premise of the hearing is that the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is being wielded as a "weapon" by public interest groups at the expense of responsible economic activity. Reality, as it so often does, does not corroborate the conservatives' narrative, however.
Rather, the scholars' letter marshals actual data and statistics that together show that relatively few actions covered by NEPA are ever subjected to "environmental impact …
This morning, CPR Member Scholar and George Washington University Law Professor Emily Hammond is set to testify before the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform, Commercial, and Antitrust Law at a hearing that will look at two highly flawed bills. While their particulars differ, each is conspicuously (if a bit clumsily) designed to rig the environmental permitting process to allow industry groups to ram through big infrastructure and construction projects while shutting out the public from its traditional and vital role of meaningful participation and engagement.
Hammond's testimony provides a devastating and thorough critique of each of the two bills under consideration – the Permitting Litigation Efficiency Act of 2018 (PLEA) (H.R. 5468) and the North Texas Water Supply Security Act of 2017 (H.R. 4423), respectively. The "problem" these bills try to "solve" is that existing administrative laws and procedures have a pesky …
Later this morning, CPR Member Scholar and Georgetown Law Professor Lisa Heinzerling will testify before the House Small Business Committee at a hearing that appears to be aimed at reveling in the Trump administration's assault on regulatory safeguards. In her testimony, Professor Heinzerling will explain why the celebratory mirth and merriment from the committee's majority members and their invited witnesses is misplaced and most likely premature.
As Heinzerling will point out, the major motivating force behind the Trump administration's assault is its so-called one-in, two-out executive order, which mandates that agencies repeal two existing rules for every new rule they wish to issue and to ensure that the cost savings that result from those repeals are sufficient to fully offset any costs the new rule might impose. This order was meant to give agencies' deregulatory efforts a shove, but it may prove to have …
Last week, the Trump administration released the annual Draft Report to Congress on the Benefits and Costs of Federal Regulations. As befitting this auspicious occasion, the administration pulled out all the stops: targeted op-eds from high-ranking administration officials; relevant operatives dispatched to the leading Sunday morning talk shows; and even a televised press conference with the president himself.
Just kidding. They buried it. Quietly. Late on a Friday afternoon. When Congress was away on recess.
And even though it's already February, this was the 2017 draft report, not the 2018 one. The data on offer run through the end of Fiscal Year (FY) 2016 – that is, the end of September of 2016. (For context, that's roughly one month before my daughter was born. She's walking now and her vocabulary encompasses three-and-a-half words.) The final 2017 report should have been out months ago, let the …
President Trump's first State of the Union address contained numerous outrageous claims and statements, rendering a full dissection and critique practically impossible. Many have already singled out one line of the speech as worthy of particular condemnation, so I'll add mine. Early on, Trump made this statement to the rapturous applause of his conservative allies in Congress: "In America, we know that faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, are the center of American life." This claim is not only patently false, but it is dangerous and fundamentally counterproductive.
As a preliminary matter, it rests on Trump's false "zero-sum game" worldview that Rep. Joe Kennedy rightly criticized in his rebuttal address. Having an active government presence in our lives is not mutually exclusive with maintaining strong bonds to our family and community or with cultivating a strong moral compass, whether informed by faith or …
Perhaps because he has so few real accomplishments to his name, President Donald Trump has developed a nasty habit of embellishing his record. From the size of the crowd at his inauguration to the number of floors in Trump Tower, he simply won't let a little thing like "reality" or "facts" or even "cardinal numbers" get in the way of his estimation of his own self-worth. Expect this behavior to be on full display at tomorrow night's State of the Union Address, where Trump will no doubt make several baseless claims about his achievements during his first year as Commander-in-Chief. One success he may tout – use of the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to repeal 15 regulatory safeguards – is a good example of such a claim that withers under scrutiny.
The CRA is a "Contract with America"-era law designed to short-circuit Congress's deliberative process …
