CPR Scholar Op-Eds Hit Assault on Our Safeguards from Trump and Congress
Four recent op-eds by CPR Member Scholars underscore the scope and danger of the current assault on our safeguards now being mounted by the president and the congressional leadership. Highlights of the most recent pieces follow, but you can always browse through all of this year’s published pieces from our scholars and staff on our website.
On May 17, Alyson Flournoy and Mary Jane Angelo, colleagues at the University of Florida Levin College of Law, co-authored “Without Public Protections, Florida Will Suffer” for the Pensacola News Journal. In it, they take on the president’s bumper-sticker-driven executive order calling on regulatory agencies to offer up two existing regulatory safeguards for every new regulations they propose — the infamous “one-in, two-out” order. They write, “The executive order ignores the massive benefits of regulation to consumers, workers, people who'd prefer to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and eat safe foods, while focusing solely and obsessively on the cost to the companies that produce unsafe products, consign employees to dangerous working conditions and pollute the environment. It is meat-axe-style policymaking that assumes every rule is bad and that repeal is, by definition, always good.”
In the Cincinnati Enquirer five days later …
I don't know what executive order the Chamber of Commerce is defending in the amicus brief it filed Monday in Public Citizen v. Trump. But it doesn't appear to be the one at issue in that lawsuit. The lawsuit charges that Trump's "one-in, two-out" executive order is unconstitutional. That's the order he issued in January requiring agencies to repeal two regulations for every one they issue. It requires agencies to make sure that the costs imposed by any new regulation are entirely offset by the costs of the two repealed regulations. And, yes, it's just as absurd as it appears at first glance – akin to a business deciding to close two old stores for every new one it opens in order to offset the costs of the new store, entirely ignoring the revenue side of the ledger.
Perhaps the inherent absurdity is …
This op-ed originally ran in The New York Times.
After decades of failed efforts to enact "regulatory reform" bills, Congress appears to be within a few votes of approving reform legislation that would strip Americans of important legal protections, induce regulatory sclerosis and subject agencies that enforce the nation's laws and regulations to potentially endless litigation.
This is not reform. These bills would sabotage agency regulation with legislative monkey wrenches. Key compromises about agency power and procedures, worked out under the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act, would be discarded by these overwhelmingly anti-regulatory bills. And because they would be statutory changes, not mere presidential edicts, these changes would likely long outlive the Trump administration.
It is easy to complain about regulation, of course, and much could surely be improved. But government rules are the foundation of the safety net that protects Americans. Are you ready to abandon …
On Thursday, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt will appear before a House Appropriations subcommittee to explain how he plans to square the Trump administration's proposed 31-percent cut to EPA's budget with its statutory obligations to protect the environment. Spoiler alert: There's no plan. The proposition – implementing and enforcing safeguards related to water, air, and hazardous materials while cutting a quarter of the agency's workforce – is preposterous.
Some House members are likely to press Pruitt on a signature issue, his disingenuous climate denialism and transparent effort to maximize profits for coal, oil, and gas producers at the expense of the environment and public health. Minimizing climate change and mitigating its effects won't come cheaply at this point, but it would be far less costly than the potential future costs of climate disaster. Just last week, researchers at Princeton and Rutgers projected …
With a massive, proposed 31 percent cut to his agency looming in the background, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is preparing to visit Capitol Hill for an appearance before a House Appropriations subcommittee on Thursday. Lawmakers, their staff, and others are likely and understandably focused on the Paris climate agreement withdrawal, the Trump administration's proposal to end federal financial support for programs that help protect and restore a variety of Great Waters like the Chesapeake Bay and the Great Lakes, and damaging staff cuts that would cripple the agency's ability to protect our health and our environment. But we should be looking beyond the big-ticket items to fully assess the damage that Pruitt and President Trump are proposing to do.
As someone who focuses on the vitality and sustainability of the Chesapeake Bay and other Great Waters in the United States, I'm convinced that the president's plans to …
To call the timing coincidental doesn't give House Republicans enough credit. Tomorrow, while the fallout from Attorney General Jeff Sessions' testimony about his connections to Russia dominates most Capitol Hill news coverage, the House will vote on H.R. 1215, a bill designed to strip injured patients of their day in court. Last week, the same legislators voted to undermine the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under the cover of James Comey's testimony about President Trump's ham-fisted attempts to interfere in the FBI's Russia investigations.
Russia is not the story here. A foreign government's interference in our elections is certainly a scintillating and important topic, but in the time it takes our many investigators to sort it all out, patients and consumers in the U.S. stand to lose protections just as fundamental to our self-determination as a secure, trustworthy voting system that …
Susan Bodine, an attorney with significant experience on Capitol Hill and at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), is President Trump's nominee to lead the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance (OECA) at the agency. She is likely to get a friendly audience tomorrow when she appears before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee to answer questions about the future of OECA. After all, she's worked closely with everyone on the panel, and there remain some aspects of federal policymaking that still proceed in a ceremonious fashion, even in Trump's America.
But were it not for a scheduling overlap with Attorney General Jeff Sessions' much anticipated testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, citizens and communities around the country might have focused more attention on Bodine's hearing. Her future office is where the rubber hits the road regarding the environmental and public …
This op-ed originally ran in the Los Angeles Times.
Miners carried canaries into coal mines; if the canary died, it was an early warning of the presence of toxic gases that could also asphyxiate humans or explode. The Trump administration has decided to use children and farmworkers as 21st century canaries, continuing their exposure to a pesticide named chlorpyrifos that has been linked to serious health concerns.
The toxicity of this commonly used pesticide was demonstrated in early May when chlorpyrifos sprayed on a Bakersfield orchard drifted into a neighboring cabbage field, sickening a dozen farmworkers. One was hospitalized.
This is the same chemical that Scott Pruitt, the new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, refused to ban in March, despite the advice of EPA scientists.
In November 2016, EPA scientists reported that residues of chlorpyrifos on food crops exceed the federal safety standards for pesticides. Their …
President Trump's historic retreat from the Paris climate accord last week is just the latest installment in the story of how his administration's anti-science and anti-protections policies with respect to climate change could do grave harm to many aspects of American life. His proposed budget is likely to be the next chapter.
While Trump sees the issue through coal-colored lenses, it's clear to anyone paying attention to actual science that that the impacts of climate change have and will continue to cause serious problems for the nation's agricultural sector. Climate and agricultural scientists are observing and projecting worsening drought, more intense rainfall, more and worsening heatwaves, and shifting populations of invasive species and agricultural pests. The result for farmers will be smaller crop yields and higher operating costs.
Many of these changes have already been documented. For example, the multi-year California drought was …
Tomorrow, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs will examine and likely vote on President's Trump's selection for Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). OIRA is the most important government office most Americans have never heard of. It is the depot through which all regulatory freight must pass, the place where ideas go to be sorted, weighed, green-lighted, or buried. It's the ganglia of the president's bureaucratic brain. At the center of those fluttering gray cells, if Trump gets his way, will be Neomi Rao.
Rao comes to the position with scant management experience and little in the way of a record. But as a professor at George Mason's Antonin Scalia Law School, she has managed to raise serious questions about how she would evaluate the health and environmental protections we all rely on.
Following Rao …
