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.

February 9, 2005. A New Progressive Agenda for Public Health and the Environment

New Book from Center for Progressive Regulation Maps Ambitious Environmental Agenda

Type: News Releases (Feb. 9, 2005)
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Regulatory Underkill: The Bush Administration's Insidious Dismantling of Public Health and Environmental Protections

Regulatory Underkill: The Bush Administration's Insidious Dismantling of Public Health and Environmental Protections, by William W. Buzbee, Robert L. Glicksman, Sidney A. Shapiro and Karen Sokol. White Paper 503, February 2005.

Type: Reports (Feb. 9, 2005)
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Author(s): William Buzbee, Robert Glicksman, Sidney Shapiro, Karen Sokol
A New Progressive Agenda for Public Health and the Environment

Writing for the Center for American Progress website, Christopher Schroeder and Rena Steinzor, co-editors of CPR's book, A New Progressive Agenda for Public Health and the Environment, offer a summary of the work, which features contributions from 20 CPR Member Scholars.

Type: Op-Eds (Feb. 5, 2005)
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Author(s): Christopher Schroeder, Rena Steinzor
Politics and Precaution

Politics and Precaution, op-ed by William Buzbee

Type: Op-Eds (Jan. 22, 2005)
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Author(s): William Buzbee
A New Progressive Agenda for Public Health and the Environment, a project of the Center for Progressive Regulation.

A New Progressive Agenda for Public Health and the Environment, a project of the Center for Progressive Regulation. A brief summary of policy recommendations from CPR's A New Progressive Agenda for Public Health and the Environment. White Paper 501, January 2005.

Type: Reports (Jan. 15, 2005)
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Author(s): Christopher Schroeder, Rena Steinzor
CPR Perspective: The Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment

CPR Perspective: 'The Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment,' by Bill Funk. CPR's Perspectives Series is a set of monographs by CPR Member Scholars on timely and important health, safety, and environmental topics. Each Perspective provides a thumbnail sketch of the competing arguments concerning a substantive or procedural principle for developing appropriate health, safety and environmental policies, and closes with the Member Scholar-author's proposed approach to the issue.

Type: Reports (Jan. 1, 2005)
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Author(s): Bill Funk
Maryland Water Standards a Quarter Century Late and Counting

On the Center for American Progress website, Rena Steinzor writes that Maryland's Department is moving "ever so glacially toward developing enforceable standards for a key provision of the Clean Water Act."

Type: Op-Eds (Dec. 15, 2004)
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Author(s): Rena Steinzor
The Feasibility Principle

The Feasibility Principle, by David Driesen, first in a series of papers outline alternatives to cost-benefit analysis. White Paper 407, December 2004.

Type: Reports (Dec. 15, 2004)
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Author(s): David Driesen
States Fail to Ensure Water Quality

Clifford Rechtschaffen, writing on the Center for American Progress website: "The federal government relies in great measure on state agencies to enforce many of the key provisions of the Clean Water Act, including the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES), a system by which polluters are issued permits to emit specific quantities of pollution into waterways. The sorry truth is that the system doesn't work very well, and enforcement of NPDES provisions is inadequate. That's the conclusion I'm forced to draw from a survey of state environmental protection agencies I conducted earlier this year."

Type: Op-Eds (Nov. 17, 2004)
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Author(s): Clifford Rechtschaffen

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