House Passes Bill to Silence Agency Experts and Frustrate Public Participation in the Regulatory Process
Last night, the House of Representatives, in an almost completely party-line vote, passed the Regulatory Integrity Act (H.R. 5226), a bill that would prohibit the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and other agencies from engaging the public on their pending efforts to address climate change, prevent foodborne illness, and otherwise act in the public interest. Center for Progressive Reform Senior Policy Analyst James Goodwin offered the following reaction to the bill's passage:
Poll after poll shows that the more the American people hear about individual regulatory safeguards, the more they support them. So it's no surprise that House conservatives, acting at the behest of their corporate benefactors, want to muzzle the agency experts who help develop these crucial protections.
Make no mistake, this bill is about preventing agencies from making the public aware of proposed health, safety, and environmental protections and soliciting the feedback needed for informing and strengthening those policies. As such, this bill flies in the face of the Administrative Procedure Act and the agencies' authorizing statutes, all of which mandate public engagement in rule development. Under the bill's vague and broad language, agencies could not even …
September 2, 2011, was a lot like today, the Friday before a long holiday weekend. While many were already turning their attention to backyard barbecues and afternoon naps in hammocks, the then-Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) Cass Sunstein, the controversial official charged with supervising federal regulatory activities, dropped a bombshell. In a notice known as a “return letter,” Sunstein publicly announced that President Obama was rejecting what would have been one of the most important public safeguards during his time in office: the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) pending rule to strengthen the national air quality standard for harmful ozone pollution. It was, and remains, one of the darkest days of Obama’s time in office, at least where public health and environmental protection are concerned.
Mountains of scientific evidence confirm that ozone pollution is nasty stuff, and high levels …
While the Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get You Want" may be an ill-advised campaign song, perhaps it can still serve as the official theme song for Sen. David Vitter's (R-LA) Government Accountability Office (GAO) report requests. The anti-regulatory senator had requested that the GAO audit the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) – a favorite punching bag of the right – to determine whether it is complying with the small business outreach requirements imposed by the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act (SBREFA). Last week, the GAO released the findings of its audit. Just one tiny problem, though: They are probably not what Vitter wanted to hear.
Before getting into the GAO's specific findings, a little background is in order. Anti-regulatory members of Congress like Vitter continuously peddle the narrative that the federal agencies that previous congresses have charged with protecting public health, safety, the environment …
NEWS RELEASE: Memo to the Next President: Let's Make Government Work for All of Us
Over the past several weeks, the Center for Progressive Reform (CPR) has urged the next president to take a constructive approach to our government and our system of health, safety, environmental, and financial safeguards. With Election Day just three months away, CPR is releasing a new paper that expands on those themes and provides a comprehensive blueprint for how the next president can rebuild our system of regulatory protections.
The new paper, Memo to the Next President: A Progressive Vision of Government and Protective Safeguards, calls on the next leader of the United States to put forth a positive vision of government and to ensure that our system for developing regulatory protections advances the public interest.
"The decades-long campaign against regulation and government helped set the stage for avoidable disasters such …
In an earlier post, CPR Member Scholar Robert Glicksman discussed the need for the next president to champion a truly positive vision of government and regulation. A new way of thinking and talking about these issues is critically important, and the president should play a key role in charting this course.
While a rhetorical shift is important and long overdue, it is also crucial that the next president be prepared to match actions to words. Consequently, the next president should also commit to building a 21st century regulatory system, one that makes good on the promise of a positive vision of government by working to protect our health, safety, environment, and financial security. Continued political gridlock in Congress – if that's what the November election yields – will likely defeat timely and effective legislative responses to public threats of harm. Instead, if any such protections are to come …
Originally published on RegBlog by CPR Member Scholar Sidney Shapiro.
Although it is well known that regulatory capture can subvert the public interest, it is becoming increasingly clear that there are two forms of capture that can affect the performance of regulatory agencies.
The "old capture"—which is what most of us think of when we think of regulatory capture—occurs when regulators become so co-opted by the regulated entities or special interests they are supposed to regulate that they end up working to advance those interests instead of the public interest articulated in their statutory mission. In the "new capture," regulators attempt to serve the public interest, but they are stymied by procedural requirements that have gummed up the regulatory process and by deep budget cuts that make it more difficult to comply with those requirements. Both forms of capture subvert the public interest, but it …
This afternoon, the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform, Commercial, and Antitrust Law will hold an oversight hearing that looks at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), the powerful White House bureau that sits at the center of the regulatory universe.
Originally created to oversee federal agencies' implementation of the Paperwork Reduction Act, a series of presidential executive orders stretching back to the Reagan administration has endowed OIRA with a powerful gatekeeping role over executive agencies' rulemaking output: no final rule of any consequence can see the light of day without OIRA's imprimatur. As CPR has documented for several years now, OIRA has generally wielded this power in an anti-regulatory fashion, typically working on behalf of politically connected industry lobbyists to block, delay, or dilute public safeguards. This pattern has held for presidential administrations from both parties.
Headlining the hearing is OIRA …
This afternoon, Speaker Paul Ryan is scheduled to announce the House majority's latest plan to weaken the U.S. system of regulatory safeguards on which all Americans depend. The following is Center for Progressive Reform Senior Policy Analyst James Goodwin's reaction to this plan:
Speaker Ryan and his anti-regulatory apostles in the House would have you believe that their latest attack strategy on our system of regulatory safeguards is a serious, forward-looking plan. In fact, everything it contains is not just old, but stale. The talking points are hackneyed; the so-called supporting research was debunked long ago; and the proposals it contains are bad ideas that have been trotted out countless times before. This plan would take us back to the laissez-faire days of the Gilded Age. An America run by robber barons didn't serve us well then, and it certainly wouldn't serve …
With the congressional majority continuing to gut enforcement budgets, forcing federal environmental and workplace safety agencies to cut staff, criminal prosecution of corporate bad actors is more important than ever. That's the thrust of Center for Progressive Reform Member Scholar Rena Steinzor's commentary in the May/June issue of The Environmental Forum, the policy journal of the Environmental Law Institute.
As Steinzor notes in the piece:
The BP oil spill and Volkswagen emissions cheating scandals, by their size and audacity, should motivate significant changes in the approach to criminal environmental enforcement, and if those changes make the federal Department of Justice more aggressive, they will come just in time, because EPA and the states’ routine civil enforcement is arguably in worse shape than at any time since the agency was created 46 years ago. EPA has endured a decade of deep budget cuts …
The growing problem of economic inequality in the United States continues to draw significant attention – and for good reason. By 2011, America's top 1 percent owned more than 40 percent of the nation's wealth, and ours ranks as one of the most unequal economies among developed countries. Meanwhile, the median wage rate for workers has remained largely unchanged in real terms over the last 40 years – even as worker productivity has grown at a steady clip – contributing to the largest gap in decades between high-wage earners and the rest of us.
Several critical legal, social, and political institutions play a role in contributing to and reinforcing the growing chasm that separates the wealthy few from the rest of us. One that is overlooked, but no less important, is the U.S. regulatory system.
When working properly, the regulatory system implements safeguards that help ensure that …
