Laying Down the Law on Rule Delays
Originally published on The Regulatory Review. Reprinted with permission.
Since the Reagan administration, it has become commonplace for new presidential administrations, in one of their first official acts after inauguration, to freeze at least some pending regulatory actions of the prior administration. These freezes have been of varying breadth and have taken varying forms.
The Trump administration’s regulatory freeze was notable for its sweeping scope and blunderbuss execution. In the early months of President Donald J. Trump’s presidency, agencies delayed many dozens of final rules issued in the Obama administration, often with little explanation other than that a new President had been elected and he wanted the agencies to revisit existing regulations.
Before the Trump administration, there was surprisingly little law on agencies’ power to delay the effectiveness of final rules. A small cohort of judicial decisions came out of the Reagan years, and a handful of cases emerged from subsequent administrations. These decisions, together, made clear that agencies’ decisions to delay final rules were reviewable by the courts and that a delay of a rule’s effective date was itself an act of substantive rulemaking subject to the notice-and-comment requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA).
The …
Tuesday afternoon, three CPR Member Scholars – William Buzbee, Lisa Heinzerling, and Rena Steinzor – will be among the experts featured at a major symposium on the threats facing our system of regulatory safeguards. The symposium, The War on Regulation: Good for Corporations, Bad for the Public, was organized by the Coalition of Sensible Safeguards (CSS), which CPR co-leads as an executive committee member, and will include a keynote address from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and closing remarks from Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh.
The goal of the symposium is to shine a spotlight on the concerted attacks being launched against our regulatory system during the Trump era, both from the Trump administration and conservatives in Congress. In addition to Senator Warren’s and Attorney General Frosh’s remarks, the War on Regulation symposium will include two panel-led discussions. The first will feature Professor Heinzerling and will examine the …
While most of the press EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is getting these days has to do with his various over-spending scandals, his more lasting impact is likely to be his scorched-earth approach to environmental protections. In an op-ed in The Hill earlier this month, CPR’s Sid Shapiro highlighted one way Pruitt hopes to make an across-the-board, anti-environment impact: By limiting the scope of scientific studies that his agency may consider when developing safeguards.
Under the guise of greater transparency, Pruitt is proposing to restrict the use of studies for which the underlying data is not completely available to the public. That may sound reasonable on its face, but the reality is that plenty of important research and knowledge derives from studies for which some measure of confidentiality is a must. Medical studies typically protect the confidential information of participating patients, for example.
As Shapiro notes …
Over the last couple of weeks, conservatives in Congress have continued their assault on public safeguards using the once-obscure and once-dormant Congressional Review Act (CRA). If their latest adventure succeeds, it will be the 16th public protection that these members, working with in concert with President Donald Trump, have obliterated over the last year, laying waste to a broad and diverse range of measures related to public health, safety, the environment, and consumer financial protection.
The anti-safeguard lawmakers behind these CRA-fueled attacks have already demonstrated what a dangerous law the CRA is, especially in the wrong hands, but this latest action would take the law to an unprecedented and even more extreme level. It targets a 2013 "bulletin" by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) aimed at discriminatory auto lending practices. As such, this would be the first time the CRA has been used to wipe out …
This post builds from an interview with the author for WYPR's The Environment in Focus with Tom Pelton, a portion of which aired on Wednesday, July 12, 2017.
One question I've been asked a number of times over the last several years is, "What does the Clean Water Rule mean for the Chesapeake Bay?" With EPA's recent proposal to repeal the rule, I'm once again hearing questions and speculation about what this repeal will mean for the Bay watershed.
I think the average person is rightly confused about the Clean Water Rule, sometimes called the Waters of the United States rule, and why they hear so much about it. Whereas most disputes involving environmental law are about providing the right standard or level of protection, the Clean Water Rule was simply about drawing clear boundary lines around waters that are and are not protected by the …
