Regulatory Policy

Regulatory safeguards play a vital role in protecting us from hazards and ensuring that companies that pollute, make unsafe products, and create workplace hazards bear the cost of cleaning up their messes and preventing injuries and deaths. Still, the regulatory system is far from perfect: Rules take too long to develop; enforcement is often feeble; and political pressure from regulated industries has led to weak safeguards.

These systemic problems are made all the more severe by the determination of the Trump administration to undercut sensible safeguards across virtually all aspects of federal regulation. Moreover, the President and his team have taken aim at the the process by which such safeguards are developed, aiming to take a system already slanted in favor of industry profit at the expense of health, safety and the environment, and make it even less protective. For example, where critics of the use of cost-benefit analysis see a system that understates the value of safeguards and overstates the cost of implementing them -- making it difficult to adopt needed protections -- the Trump administration seeks simply to ignore benefits of safeguards, pretending they do not exist. The result is a regulatory system that fails to enforce landmark laws like the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and more.

CPR exposes and opposes efforts by opponents of sensible safeguards to undermine the regulatory system, fighting back against knee-jerk opposition to environmental, health, and safety protections. Below, see what CPR Members Scholars and staff have had to say in reports, testimony, op-eds and more. Use the search box to narrow the list.

Letter to EPA on industry efforts to stall IRIS toxicological assessment through non-germane comments

Letter to EPA on "filter failure," resulting from industry efforts to stall IRIS toxicological assessment through non-germane comments

Type: Letters to Agencies (Nov. 1, 2012)
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Author(s): Rena Steinzor, Matt Shudtz
Letter to Senators on Independent Agency Regulatory Analysis Act

Joint letter to Senators on Independent Agency Regulatory Analysis Act

Type: Legislative Testimony (Nov. 1, 2012)
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Author(s): Rena Steinzor, Thomas McGarity, Sidney Shapiro
Letter to ACUS on its bias in favor of industry

Letter to the Administrative Conference of the United States on bias toward the views of regulated industry

Type: Letters to Agencies (Oct. 18, 2012)
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Author(s): Rena Steinzor, Thomas McGarity
Letter to ACUS on science in the administrative process

Letter to the Administrative Conference of the United States on science in the administrative process. "In particular, we are interested in the recommendations related to the role of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs [and its] ...failure to follow the transparency requirements of Executive Order 12,866 and its interference in matters that involve expert scientific judgment.

Type: Letters to Agencies (Aug. 21, 2012)
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Author(s): Rena Steinzor, Matt Shudtz
Letter to ACUS on collaboration with the Chamber of Commerce

Letter to Administrative Conference of the United States on co-sponsorship of conference on "incorporation by reference" in the international arena with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Type: Letters to Agencies (April 27, 2012)
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Author(s): Thomas McGarity
Opportunity Wasted: The Obama Administration's Failure to Adopt Needed Regulatory Safeguards in a Timely Way is Costing Lives and Money

In April 2011, CPR issued a white paper in which a group of Member Scholars and Policy Analysts identified 12 key health, safety, and environmental regulatory actions slowly working their way through the Obama Administration’s regulatory pipeline. In the white paper, Twelve Crucial Health, Safety, and Environmental Regulations: Will the Obama Administration Finish in Time?, the authors warned that the Administration’s failure to adopt a sense of urgency with respect to completing its work had opened the door to the very real prospect that nine of the twelve regulatory actions might get caught up in the backwash of the 2012 presidential campaign, and indeed might never be completed by the current Administration. In this report, CPR follows up to see how the Administration has done.

Type: Reports (March 19, 2012)
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Author(s): Rena Steinzor, James Goodwin
Bending Science: How Special Interests Corrupt Public Health Research

What do we know about the possible poisons that industrial technologies leave in our air and water? How reliable is the science that federal regulators and legislators use to protect the public from dangerous products? Drawing together a host of little-known but dramatic cases, Bending Science: How Special Interests Corrupt Public Health Research, by CPR Member Scholars Thomas O. McGarity and Wendy Wagner, comprehensively documents what has been suspected for years: how extensively scientific data are misused and abused in regulatory and tort law. Sound science is critical to the public policy process, particularly where health and safety issues are concerned. But as Professors McGarity and Wagner show, many interest groups do all they can to influence and undermine independent and honest research, in an effort to bend science to their ideological will.

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Author(s): Wendy Wagner, Thomas McGarity

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