There is plenty of environmental despair right now . . . spreading oil in the Gulf, legislative inaction on climate change and a host of other issues, and the sense that for every step forward, there is a special interest that will take the nation two steps back. 

So, in this downward spiral of disappointments, is there any ray of hope? Rena Steinzor and Sidney Shapiro hit upon one promising possibility in their important new book, The People's Agents and the Battle to Protect the American Public: Special Interests, Government, and Threats to Health, Safety, and the Environment. After cataloging the sorry state of the regulatory institutions tasked with protecting health and the environment, the authors offer innovative suggestions for a set of positive metrics that not only help hold agencies publicly accountable, but also reward agencies for acting proactively. An added, invaluable attribute of these positive metrics is …

Across the full spectrum of outside cognoscenti who are focused on the reality that a small office at the White House has final authority over the agencies charged with preventing catastrophes like the BP oil spill and the Big Branch mine disaster, one threshold assumption is sacrosanct. This tiny Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, now headed by former Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein, ought to operate in bright sunshine, disclosing fully its communications with the agencies so the public can see its impact on rules and other administrative activities.  We have insisted on this point, our loyal opposition at the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness agrees with it, and no less a bipartisan body than the Government Accountability Office has found that such transparency is too often lacking. As a matter of fact, the goal is not at all abstract: the Executive Order authorizing OIRA, 12866 contains …

With characteristic audacity, the Wall Street Journal editorial page today is arguing against the precautionary approach to environmental policy that undergirds our system of environmental laws, even as the oil continues to gush into the Gulf of Mexico. Instead, they want to shift the burden of proof and only allow regulators to restrain corporate greed when the government can first quantify and monetize the environmental harm that will result and demonstrate that it outweighs the money to be made by taking environmental risks. The problem is, of course, that when you require cost-benefit analysis, the environment loses, because most of the values at stake on that side of the equation—human lives, air you can breathe, water you can swim and fish in—just can’t be measured in dollar terms. 

The editorial writers of the Wall Street Journal lament that the disaster in the Gulf is …

CPR President Rena Steinzor has an op-ed in this morning's Baltimore Sun on the various regulatory failures at work in the BP oil spill. She writes that important questions need to be answered "about how the federal regulatory system allowed BP and other oil companies to drill in waters so deep without effective fail-safes," and continues:

In truth, this is just the last in a string of profit-driven tragedies that have horrified us recently. Consider the 29 workers smothered in a West Virginia mine shaft; salmonella-laced peanut butter that killed nine and sickened thousands; the recall of 8 million Toyotas after as many as 89 people were killed in sudden acceleration incidents; children's toys slathered with lead paint; drywall venting sulfuric acid into living rooms; and now the worst environmental disaster in our history, which initially killed 11 workers.

The companies that caused these tragedies …

“Although the 1976 RCRA Resource Conservation and Recovery Act statute does not require benefit-cost justification of RCRA regulations, this RIA regulatory impact analysis presents a qualitative benefit analysis for compliance with OMB’s 2003 ‘Circular A-4: Regulatory Analysis’ best practices guidance.” This statement comes from the executive summary to the cost-benefit analysis (CBA) that EPA sent to OIRA last October with its original proposed rule for regulating coal ash waste, and it is without a doubt the most important sentence in the entire 165-page document. It is, in its way, a yelp of protest from EPA against being required by OIRA to spend time and resources measuring the likely effectiveness of a proposed regulation by standards not required by statute.

Not surprisingly, OIRA was unmoved. Indeed, a before-and-after comparison of EPA’s original and final CBAs released with EPA’s proposed coal ash rule reveals the extent …

This post is written by CPR President Rena Steinzor and CPR Policy Analyst James Goodwin.

President Obama appointed Lisa Jackson to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on December 15, 2008. Confirmed by the Senate on January 22, 2009, she is a Cabinet-rank member of the Administration and the first African American to serve as the public face of environmental protection for any administration. Whether she wears an EPA baseball cap and windbreaker to tour the waterfront of her native New Orleans, now threatened by the BP oil spill, or she sits in the witness chair with television lights in her face to testify before any one of the dozen congressional committees claiming a piece of her agency, Jackson rises or falls on her own merits. And she has mostly been rising, driving her 18,000 member staff to new levels of activity and invention.

How lamentable …

Our loyal opposition at the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness has engaged in some very creative reading of legal opinions in order to breathe new life into a discredited anti-regulatory tool of the George W. Bush era: the Information Quality Act. This pesky little statute instructs the Office of Management and Budget to “provide policy and procedural guidance to Federal agencies for ensuring and maximizing the quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information (including statistical information) disseminated by Federal Agencies.” 

Enacted as an appropriations rider in 2001, the seemingly innocuous restatement of the goal that the government should always strive to be accurate was the brainchild of Jim Tozzi, a former Reagan Administration OMB official, who has since used it to force internal reviews of EPA pesticide and sewage sludge regulations, among other items.  Tozzi’s colleague William Kovacs of the Chamber of Commerce pronounced the statute “the …

On March 19, OIRA Administrator Cass Sunstein issued the office's first Review Letter of the Obama Administration, telling the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to redo their studies on how to design the labels for the agency’s new “Tire Fuel Efficiency Consumer Information Program.” (For background on Review Letters and the other types of OIRA letters, see here.) Those new studies will delay implementation of the tire efficiency regulation by at least half a year, and likely longer.

Under the tire efficiency program, NHTSA must develop a system for setting tire fuel efficiency ratings and design a label for tire manufacturers to affix to their products that convey these ratings to consumers, so that consumers can consider the fuel-efficiency effects of different tires when deciding which to buy.

When NHTSA sent its draft final rule to OIRA in December, it appeared that the rule …