New Research Affirms That Corporate Interest Lobbying at OIRA Holds Sway
When asked by a reporter why he robbed banks, the notorious bank robber Willie Sutton is said to have responded, “Because that’s where the money is.” For decades, the accepted conventional wisdom held that a similar dynamic motivated legions of industry lobbyists to parade through the front door at the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). Why—one might ask—does industry spend so much time complaining to OIRA’s political appointees and staff-level economists about rules they find inconvenient to their bottom line? Because, like CPR has been saying for many years in reports, apparently that’s where the regulatory relief is to be had.
In 2011, we released a ground-breaking report that sought to move beyond mere intuition and confirm with actual data the degree to which industry was able to wield its outsized influence to secure favorable deregulatory changes to agencies’ pending rulemakings. Using publicly available data regarding OIRA’s meetings with outside lobbyists, the report found that rules that were subject to extensive lobbying during OIRA review were indeed more likely to be changed and delayed by OIRA. Our specific findings included:
- Sixty-five percent of the participants represented regulated industry interests as …
When it commenced on June 1, OIRA’s review of the EPA’s draft final rule to limit greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants launched a flurry of lobbying activity among a veritable who’s who of America’s largest fossil fuel polluters. In just over six weeks, the White House’s antiregulatory shop has presided over no less than 21 Executive Order 12866 meetings, the majority of which involved high-priced corporate lobbyists seeking to dilute, delay, or block the rule outright.
The log for a July 1 meeting requested by Berkshire Hathaway Energy contains an interesting tidbit: Among the attendees was a representative of the Small Business Administration’s (SBA) Office of Advocacy. Nominally, of course, the mission of the SBA Office of Advocacy is to ensure that the concerns of America’s small businesses are adequately represented in the federal rulemaking process. So, it …
Today, CPR Member Scholars, with a larger group of law professors, submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in the case of Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) v. Electric Power Supply Association.
The professors submitted the brief because, "they believe that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit made serious errors when it held that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) lacked authority to regulate operators’ rules for demand response (DR) in the wholesale electricity markets. That holding is contrary to the text, history, and structure of the Federal Power Act (FPA), which mandates that FERC must remedy 'practices . . . affecting' wholesale electricity rates to ensure such rates are just and reasonable. Moreover, it ignores FERC’s reasonable interpretation of its statutory authority."
They argue that, "FERC reasonably determined it had jurisdiction to remedy wholesale market dysfunctions with respect to demand response …
“I’m Republican, and I want to do regulatory reform.” Whether they’ve uttered that exact nine-word phrase or not, virtually every Republican on Capitol Hill has enthusiastically endorsed the sentiment it expresses at some point—if not on a near-daily basis—during the last few years. Who could blame them? The unshakable conviction that our regulatory system is broken and that gutting it is the key to its salvation is apparently one of the few areas where all the GOP’s members can find common ground. Attacking the regulatory system has become a safe topic of conversation for conservatives—almost their version of “weather” small talk. And not for nothing, they’re pretty confident it’s a political winner, too.
Witness this week, when both the House and the Senate have scheduled oversight hearings for the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA)—an …
Public Citizen to host discussion of CPR Member Scholar Rena Steinzor’s new book, “Why Not Jail? Industrial Catastrophes, Corporate Malfeasance, and Government Inaction.”
On Monday, July 20, 2015 Public Citizen, the Center for Progressive Reform and the Bauman Foundation will lead a discussion focused on CPR’s immediate past president and University of Maryland Law School professor Rena Steinzor’s book, “Why Not Jail? Industrial Catastrophes, Corporate Malfeasance, and Government Inaction.”
Watch and listen to a recording of this discussion.
Date: Monday, July 20
Time: 4:00-5:30 pm
Place: Offices of Public Citizen 1600 20th Street, NW (northwest corner of 20th and Q, NW) Washington, DC 20009
Presenters Include:
Rena Steinzor - Professor, University of Maryland Carey School of Law and immediate past president, Center for Progressive Reform
Robert Weissman - President, Public Citizen (Moderator)
Russell Mokhiber - Editor of Corporate Crime Reporter and the co-author (with …
In Michigan v. EPA, handed down two weeks ago, the Supreme Court waded into the decades-long debate over the use of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) in agency rulemaking. The decision struck down EPA’s limits on mercury emissions from power plants for the agency’s failure to consider costs, and so appears, superficially at least, like a win for the pro-CBA camp. Indeed, Professor Cass Sunstein of Harvard—President Obama’s former “regulatory czar” and one of CBA’s most prominent cheerleaders—has been crowing about the opinion, hailing it as “a rifle shot,” ringing in the arrival of “the Cost-Benefit State.”
But Sunstein’s celebration is a bit premature; his so-called “cost-benefit state” remains mostly in his imagination. In fact, there is good reason to believe that the Court remains quite skeptical of the particular brand of CBA that Professor Sunstein advocates. And that’s very good …
House GOP’s “Negative Earmarks” in Appropriations Bill Would Undercut Key Protections and Cost Thousands of Lives
Today, the Center for Progressive Reform released a new Issue Alert, “Earmarking Away the Public Interest: How Congressional Republicans Use Antiregulatory Appropriations Riders to Benefit Powerful Polluting Industries.” The report, by CPR Member Scholars Thomas O. McGarity of the University of Texas School of Law and Richard Murphy of Texas Tech University School of Law and CPR Senior Policy Analyst James Goodwin, examines “negative earmarks” — riders attached to must-pass appropriations bills that block agencies from taking specific actions to protect public health, safety, and the environment.
The report compares this type of attack on public safeguards, attached to legislation without public scrutiny, to the “positive” earmarks like the “Bridge to Nowhere” that Congress has moved in recent years to prevent.
The report focuses in on this week’s House consideration …
Earlier this week, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 2576, an update to the long-outdated Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), which governs regulation of toxic chemicals.
CPR Member Scholar and University of Richmond Law School professor Noah Sachs and CPR Executive Director Matthew Shudtz wrote a piece for The Hill, highlighting some crucial problems with the bill the House passed.
They note:
Both bills, for example, require EPA to move through the backlog of untested chemicals and make safety determinations. A safety determination is a ruling by the agency about whether the chemical poses ‘unreasonable risk’ to human health or the environment – a first step for further regulatory action.
But astoundingly, the House bill requires the agency to initiate only 10 chemical evaluations per year ‘subject to the availability of appropriations,’ and the Senate bill requires EPA to make these safety determinations for only 25 chemicals …
Anyone who cares about the development of sound public policy has grown distraught over congressional gridlock. The House and Senate are dysfunctional to an extent not seen in modern times. Neither is able to develop bipartisan legislation to deal with a slew of urgent social problems, from immigration and the minimum wage to the strengthening of outdated health and safety laws. But the kneejerk glee that accompanies any bipartisan action regardless of content is just as dangerous. Take, for example, the bill to “reinvigorate” the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) that just passed the House by a vote of 398 to 1.
The sad truth is that we don’t require enough testing on toxic chemicals before chemical manufacturers market them in this country, and public health has paid a heavy price for this omission. It’s difficult to think of more than a very small handful …
When your public approval rating has hovered at or below 20 percent for the last several years, maybe the last thing you should be doing is maligning other government institutions. That didn’t stop a group of Senators from spending several hours doing just that today during a joint hearing involving the Senate Budget and Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committees. The joint hearing was nominally about a nonsense regulatory reform proposal called “regulatory budgeting” (for more on that, see here), but it quickly devolved into a no-holds-barred hate session directed at federal agency employees, as the upright and honorable members of the “world’s greatest deliberative body” repeatedly attacked the prevailing “culture” at agencies.
The term “culture” was repeated dozens of times throughout the hearing, as the conservative members of the committee waxed patronizingly about the need to change the “culture” at agencies. The Republican Senators …
