CPR's Comments on OMB's Draft Report on Costs and Benefits of Regulations: Why More of the Same?
Cass Sunstein had barely begun settling in to his new position as Administrator of OMB’s Office of Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) in September, when OIRA released a draft of OMB’s 2009 Report to Congress on the Benefits and Costs of Federal Regulations. Today marks the deadline for submitting comments to OMB on the draft, and I joined CPR President Rena Steinzor and Policy Analyst James Goodwin in submitting comments.
We read this year’s report with interest, curious to see how the new administration would approach this annual ritual. While OIRA has in the past been a nerve-center of anti-regulatory ideology and the annual report a ritualized hymn to the virtues of cost-benefit analysis, we hoped Obama’s OIRA would use the annual report as an opportunity to fundamentally re-envision its mission – to perhaps re-invent itself as a resource providing positive and constructive assistance to the embattled, de-funded and demoralized federal agencies charged with protecting our health and environment.
Overall, we were disappointed. While this year’s report sanitized some of the more blatantly ideological material that had become a staple of past reports, the basic form and content of the report remain unchanged. It continues to waste inordinate …
Last month the National Research Council (NRC) released Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use. Properly understood, the NRC report is an admirable attempt to bring the consequences of energy use into sharp focus by putting those consequences into terms that are readily understandable by the general public. The NRC recognizes that the report is limited because it was unable to quantify and monetize all the impacts of energy production and use, thereby significantly understating their full costs. But the problem is worse: Even where the NRC did attempt to quantify and monetize the costs associated with energy, the methods that it used systematically understate the costs of those impacts.
According to the NRC report, the “cost” of energy production and use was at least $120 billion in 2005. The report reached this result by identifying and quantifying many of the impacts of …
This guest post is written by Thomas Tolin, Assistant Professor of Economics at West Chester University, and Martin Patwell, Director of the Office of Services for Students with Disabilities at WCU.
In the recently published SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance the authors, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, make the following claim: (p. 138-139)
As we wrote earlier, the law of unintended consequences is among the most potent laws in existence… Consider the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which was intended to safeguard disabled workers from discrimination. A noble intention, yes? Absolutely--but the data convincingly show that the net result was fewer jobs for Americans with disabilities. Why? After the ADA became law, employers were so worried they wouldn’t be able to discipline or fire bad workers who had a disability that they avoided hiring such workers …
One of the great political communications successes of the past 30 years has been the right wing’s relentless assault on the American regulatory system. Think of the words and images that have come to be associated with “regulation” in that time: red tape, bureaucrats, green eye shades, piles of paper stretching to the ceiling, and more. And the approach has worked – remarkably well, in fact, given the compelling imagery on the other side of the ledger: children left to play in unregulated polluted waterways, power plants belching smoke into the air we breathe, foods that poison and drugs that induce heart attacks. Imagine if the producers of campaign commercials decided to dig into that Pandora’s Box of images!
Most of the attention that the regulatory system draws focuses on individual skirmishes – a fight over how and to what extent to regulate mercury, for example. Many …
Greenwire and the Los Angeles Times ran pieces last week shining a light into a dark corner where staff at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs once again meddled in scientific regulatory programs where they do not belong, second-guessing EPA’s administration of the Endocrine Disruptor Screening Program (EDSP). The program, mandated by Congress under the Food Quality Protection Act, is designed to identify pesticides like DDT that cause profound changes in wildlife and, potentially, people, through the ubiquitous application of pesticides. Both articles highlighted the key problem, which is that the OMB-promoted changes to the EDSP would undercut EPA’s attempt to get a full suite of new test data on 67 chemicals’ potential endocrine-disrupting effects. But there's an additional important issue: OMB’s meddling, under the auspices of its power to enforce the Paperwork Reduction Act, shifted a heavy burden from industry’s shoulders …
Before Cass Sunstein had spent much more than a week as the official director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), he invited us over to the White House to talk about how he wanted to shape his small office of economists and statisticians into a strong force for progressive policy within the White House. Followers of the Center for Progressive Reform know that we put out a report in the run-up to his confirmation that was critical of his views on cost-benefit analysis. So I give him credit for opening the door to us, and so soon after his confirmation at that.
It was a good meeting, and we pledged to keep in touch as he undertakes what I hope will be a re-education that will convert his staff from the Bush mode – serving as a sort of waiting room for disgruntled industries – to …
How’s this for any irony? David Michaels, President Obama’s nominee to head the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), has written a book, published by Oxford University press, documenting how industry manufactures doubts that chemicals harm people by accusing regulators and plaintiff lawyers of relying of “junk science” instead of “sound science.” Now, after Michaels has exposed this effort as a public relations campaign that mischaracterizes how science actually works, he is being attacked on the grounds, you guessed it, of favoring junk science. And, because he favors “junk science,” he must be, you guessed it, a “radical.”
Michaels, an epidemiologist and research professor at the School of Public Health and Health Services at George Washington University, notes that the “sound science” campaign originated with the tobacco industry’s efforts to stave off regulation and tort suits by attacking the science indicating that smoking kills …
Issues of national security have always enjoyed a free pass when it comes to the use of cost-benefit analysis (CBA) as the primary form of making decisions. For example, no military official or politician interested in keeping his job would ever dare publicly question whether the additional money spent on extra armor for tanks to keep soldiers safer could be put to better use somewhere else.
There are plenty of reasons why we are willing to accord national security decisions this special treatment. For one thing, as Ezra Klein noted recently, “we're uncomfortable subjecting military demands to traditional economic analysis.” Using CBA for military decisions necessarily puts us in a difficult ethical position: It seeks to prioritize the goal of “efficiency” over values that many Americans hold truly sacred, such as the duty of protecting the lives of our soldiers. These values often represent moral absolutes on …
After weeks of sustained attack from the right-wing on issues that are marginal to the job the President asked him to do, Cass Sunstein has emerged from the nomination process bloody but apparently unbowed (here's this afternoon's roll call). He is now the nation’s “regulatory czar,” Director of the White House OMB Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Although Professor Sunstein has been sitting in the Old Executive Office Building for months, he has undoubtedly been preoccupied with his nomination battle. Having survived the occasionally nonsensical trial by partisan and self-serving flight of fancy that was his confirmations process, we hope he will notice that his staff at OIRA has been behaving as if the 2008 election never happened. Having paid careful attention to OIRA over these past few months, in search of evidence of a new outlook, I’m sorry to report that I’ve …
Late this afternoon the Senate ended debate, in a 63-35 cloture vote, on the nomination of Cass Sunstein for Administrator of the Office of Information and Reuglatory Affairs (OIRA). Here's a quick look back at what CPR scholars have said about the Sunstein nomination and the role of OIRA in regulatory policy:
- CPR Member Scholars' Jan 2009 report, Reinvigorating Protection of Health, Safety, and the Environment: The Choices Facing Cass Sunstein
- Rena Steinzor: Some troubling words at Sunstein's confirmation hearing, but also a few positive pledges
- CPR Member Scholars comments to OMB on a new executive order on regulatory review.
- Sidney Shapiro: What happened to the Executive Order on regulatory review?
- Rena Steinzor: What should Cass Sunstein do in his first days?
- Rena Steinzor: Business as usual so far at OMB?
