Putting Regulatory Tools to Work Protecting People and the Environment
Middle school civics texts tell us that Congress writes the laws and the executive branch enforces them. In practice, of course, it’s a good deal more complicated than that.
When it comes to health, safety and the environment – the Center for Progressive Reform’s core issue areas – executive branch enforcement of the law has become yet another arena to fight and re-fight policy battles presumably settled in Congress. In particular, regulated entities – including companies that pollute or that make potentially dangerous products – have become especially savvy at leveraging their relationships in Washington. During the Bush years, their efforts helped them secure enfeebled regulatory policy – regulations that often undercut the very laws they were meant to effect, and enforcement approaches that rendered meaningful regulations all but toothless.
In the view of CPR Member Scholars, the federal regulatory system has fallen – or perhaps more accurately – been pushed into a state of disrepair. Much needed health and safety regulations have been delayed for years, weakened to the point of ineffectiveness, and then sporadically enforced. Federal agencies charged with protecting Americans from various hazards in our food, consumer products, chemicals in commerce, the air and water, and in the workplace have been drastically underfunded, and until recently, their agendas diverted.
The consequences of this failed system of regulation are the stuff of national headlines – construction cranes collapsing, toxic drywall, poisonous children's jewelry and toys, contaminated peanut butter and produce, drugs with fatal side effects, and more. The agencies established to protect Americans from these hazards need to be reinvigorated, and their efforts to protect Americans given higher priority.
The Obama Administration did not create the regulatory mess, but it falls to the Administration to fix it. But it has not made nearly as much progress as many CPR Member Scholars had hoped or expected, and now it’s facing plenty of opposition from industry allies in Congress.
In August 2011, CPR Member Scholars published a report making the case for reinvigorating the nation’s regulatory system. “Saving Lives, Preserving the Environment, Growing the Economy: The Truth About Regulation,” by CPR Member Scholar Sidney Shapiro, National Labor College economics professor Ruth Ruttenberg, and CPR Policy Analyst James Goodwin, assembles powerful evidence of the value of regulation to society, countering with facts and data regulatory opponents’ fact-free description of regulation as job-killing and economy-wrecking. From unleaded gasoline, to saving the bald eagle, to banning thalidomide, to fighting meat-borne pathogens, to a host of worker safety measures, regulation has made Americans safer, healthier, and longer-lived, while protecting against a variety of economic and environmental hazards. (Also see an editorial memo and blog post on the subject, both from Sidney Shapiro.)
Injecting More Politics into Regulation: The REINS Act, Legislation to Prevent Regulating Greenhouse Gas Emissions
The GOP majority in the House of Representatives has promised in 2011 to advance legislation designed to politicize and gum up the regulatory system even further. The GOP's proposed REINS Act would prevent new health, safety, environmental and other regulations from going into effect unless both houses of Congress vote within 70 days of promulgation to approve them, by means of a joint congressional resolution. Congress can already vote to block regulations, but the proposed approach would stack the deck against much-needed regulations, by harnessing the power of congressional delay and gridlock in service of an anti-regulatory agenda, and allowing a single house of Congress to block enforcement of federal law simply by failing to vote. In December 2010, CPR's Sidney Shapiro penned an editorial memorandum on the subject. And several Member Scholars published op-eds in papers across the nation. (See David Driesen in the Syracuse Post-Standard, Noah Sachs in the New Republic, and Joe Tomain in the Cincinnati Enquirer.)
Another GOP proposal, embodied in the "TRAIN" Act, would establish an inter-agency panel to review EPA's Clean Air Act and coal ash regulations, including those addressing greenhouse gas emissions, to assess their cumulative economic impact. As CPR's Rena Steinzor said in testimony about the bill before a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the real effect of the bill would be to take decisions about environmental regulation out of the hands of environmental regulators. Moreover, the bill completely ignores the benefits of regulation, which have been calculated and found to be much greater than the costs. Read a blog post on the bill and Steinzor's testimony.
A $1.75 Trillion Fiction
In all these battles, regulatory opponents have relied on a dramatically overstated estimate of the cost to industry of regulation, based on a report commissioned by the Small Busines Administration’s Office of Advocacy that fixed the one-year cost of regulation at $1.75 trillion. In February 2011, CPR Member Scholar Sidney Shapiro, together with Ruth Ruttenberg, Ph.D., Professor of Economics, National Labor College, and CPR Policy Analyst James Goodwin, published a report debunking this most conspicuous bit of rhetoric in the anti-regulatory arsenal. Their white paper examined the SBA’s report (called the Crain and Crain report, for its authors), and concluded that it was based on flimsy evidence and fuzzy math. Most conspicuously, it made no effort to account for the economic benefits of regulation – which according to the Office of Management and Budget are larger than the costs – rather like asserting that buying a car is a drain on the economy because it costs the purchaser money, without accounting for jobs created, profit made, etc.
Read about the Member Scholars’ efforts on regulatory issues on these pages:
