Distracter-in-Chief
Only a few days into the Trump administration, and a “gang that doesn’t shoot straight” narrative is taking root in the media. From outright lies about crowd numbers at the inauguration, to fictionalized accounts of millions of illegally cast votes, to hashtag-ready assertions about “alternative facts,” it’s been a rough start, and the media is covering it all, exposing the dishonesty.
That, at least, is how I imagine the conversation is going in Washington, D.C., news bureaus. But while all that ink and airtime is being spent on the new administration’s distant relationship with reality, it’s not having any apparent difficulty moving its agenda. On the regulatory front, it has begun to freeze or roll back a host of recently developed federal safeguards while its allies in the House of Representatives have been working on a series of bills that would do further and perhaps greater damage to protections for our health, safety, and the environment.
In addition, the administration promises a balance-tipping Supreme Court nominee within a couple weeks, and only today has the media begun paying attention to the question of who might get the nod.
Back in November, I wondered aloud in …
NEWS RELEASE: Rep. Mick Mulvaney Should Not Be Confirmed to Lead the Office of Management and Budget
Today, the Senate Committees on Budget and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs held confirmation hearings for Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-SC), President Donald Trump's selection for Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Mulvaney tried to assuage some of the concerns about his nomination, but his answers attempting to mask his disdain for public protections – combined with his past rhetoric and actions – show that he should not be confirmed.
Robert Verchick, President of the Center for Progressive Reform (CPR), summed up the concerns about Mulvaney. "The Office of Management and Budget serves several key roles within the federal government, including proposing the budgets of protective agencies and overseeing the regulatory process," Verchick said. "As an anti-government ideologue, Rep. Mick Mulvaney is wholly unqualified to serve as director of …
My wife is a high school history teacher, and pretty much every year, she has at least one story to tell about a student lifting some significant chunk of text from a website and using it in a paper without attribution. The kids get caught by those nifty anti-plagiarism search engines teachers use, which are about as heartless and automatic as those unmanned, and frankly, unsportsmanlike, speed cameras that dot my neighborhood streets.
I suppose it’s easier to accidently plagiarize in the age of the Internet, what with cutting and pasting. So I have a smidgen of sympathy for my wife’s 9th graders when they get busted because I wonder if their academic sins were accidental.
I’m willing to extend no such presumption of innocence to the House Freedom Caucus. Apparently, not content to misappropriate the word “freedom,” they also are heavy into borrowing …
In a statement Wednesday responding to President-elect Trump’s choice of climate change denier Scott Pruitt to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, CPR President Robert Verchick said that the choice was “a clear indication that the administration plans a full-throated assault on environmental protections.”
In an op-ed in The New York Times this morning, CPR Member Scholar William Buzbee describes some of the challenges Pruitt and Trump will face as they undertake that regressive effort to unravel the fabric of rules and regulations protecting the environment. Trump has threatened a wholesale rollback of environmental protections, but Buzbee warns that:
Regulatory reversals lacking a legal or factual basis would result in lawsuits by citizens, states and industries supporting the regulations. Challengers would argue that the rules are rooted in statutory language, court precedents and in careful documentation of environmental, technological and market facts. On the climate, for example …
What does Steve Bannon – who, despite his well-documented racism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny, was appointed as president-elect Trump's senior counselor and White House strategist – have to do with a rarified and wonky policy exercise such as regulatory cost-benefit analysis? Unfortunately, a lot, as it turns out.
From a serious policy perspective, the Trump administration's approach to governance remains terra incognita, and this is especially the case with its approach to implementing laws through regulations. So far, Trump has signaled that he has adopted the establishment Republican Party's line on opposing all regulatory safeguards across the board, putting the narrow interests of politically powerful multinational corporations ahead of working families and struggling communities. If and when he follows through, one of the things we can expect is that his administration will continue to subject new agency safeguards to a highly slanted and anti-regulatory test known as …
We are about to experience a fifth major assault on the health, safety, environmental, and consumer protections that Congress put in place during the 1960s and 1970s, protections that most of us take for granted. And all indications are that this assault will be more intense and more comprehensive than any of the prior assaults on the governmental protections that shield our families and communities from the ravages of an unfettered free market.
In my 2013 book, Freedom to Harm, I documented the first four assaults on federal regulatory protections by a dedicated group of trade associations, corporate lobbyists, think tanks, conservative foundations, and activist groups who were determined to return the American political economy to the laissez-faire benchmark of the late 19th century Gilded Age.
The First Assault began during the last two years of the Carter administration and lasted well into the Reagan administration. Because …
Hazy as they may be, we are all looking into our crystal balls, trying to envision what a Donald Trump presidency will mean for the world around us. The first glimpses we have of the future – Steve Bannon at Trump's right hand, Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, Michael Flynn as National Security Advisor – project something much darker and more insular than befits a nation whose arc of history is as progressive as ours. Of course, that arc is long and there have been many setbacks and struggles along the way. A Trump presidency will test us. Since November 8, I've witnessed family and friends, allies and colleagues vacillate between moments of despair and moments of inspired energy.
At CPR, we have set out to channel that tension and turn it into something useful. Beginning tomorrow with a post from Tom McGarity, CPR Member Scholars and …
Earlier this month, the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy published a collection of essays filled with legal and policy recommendations for the next president. Center for Progressive Reform Member Scholar Lisa Heinzerling closed out the publication with a piece on improving federal environmental policy, which includes recommendations for how the next president can ensure that the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) stays out of the way.
Under the auspices of a series of executive orders, OIRA has been interfering with agency rulemaking and the development of crucial public protections for decades. From closed-door meetings with industry lobbyists to inappropriate substantive changes that overrule the judgment of agency scientists and other experts, OIRA has not done enough to support agency actions in pursuit of cleaner air and water, better protected natural resources, and safer workplaces. Instead, OIRA's record is marred by …
Originally posted at Notice & Comment, a blog of the Yale Journal on Regulation and the American Bar Association Section of Administrative Law & Regulatory Practice, as part of an online symposium entitled Reflections on Seminole Rock: The Past, Present, and Future of Deference to Agency Regulatory Interpretations. Reprinted with permission.
The Separation of Powers Restoration Act, or more easily known as SOPRA, is not a complicated bill. If enacted, it would amend the Administrative Procedure Act to require courts to decide de novo all questions of law, whether constitutional, statutory, or regulatory. As the House Report makes abundantly clear, the intent is to overrule statutorily both Chevron, USA, Inc. v. NRDC and Auer v. Robbins (and its forebear Bowles v. Seminole Rock & Sand Co.), but not Skidmore v. Swift & Co.
The idea is not new. Indeed, beginning in 1975, well before Chevron began its …
Originally published on RegBlog by CPR Member Scholar Amy Sinden.
In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's opinion in Michigan v. EPA last term, a number of commentators have revived talk of something called the "Cost Benefit State." It is supposed to be a good thing, although it makes some of us shudder. The phrase was originally coined by Cass Sunstein in a 2002 book by that name. It describes a supposedly utopian government in which agencies and courts apply to all regulatory decision-making a formal cost-benefit analysis (CBA) grounded in welfare economics.
Sunstein and other eager proponents of CBA have seized on language in the Michigan case that, in the course of striking down the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) mercury rule, gestured toward the existence of a presumption favoring the consideration of costs in regulatory decision-making. Sunstein heralded the opinion …
