Regulatory Policy

Protecting Health, Safety 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 with the White House, agency political appointees and other political players in Washington to secure ineffective regulatory policy in the form of regulations that undercut the very laws they are meant to effect, and enforcement approaches that render meaningful regulations all but toothless.
 
The result is regulatory policy that too often fails to enforce the law, and does far too little to protect health, safety and the environment. Read about CPR Member Scholars’ work to make sure to make sure laws designed to protect health, safety and the environment are enforced.
 
In January 2009, the Center for Progressive Reform released a report detailing concerns about the approach to regulatory policy taken by Professor Cass Sunstein, President Obama's choice to head the White House OMB Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) -- the so-called "regulatory czar."  The report, Reinvigorating Protection of Health, Safety, and the Environment: The Choices Facing Cass Sunstein, raised a number of concerns.  Among them:
  • Sunstein is a stout supporter of cost-benefit analysis as a primary tool for assessing regulations, despite its imprecision and the ease with which it is manipulated to achieve preferred policy outcomes; and
  • He supports such cost-benefit approaches as the widely condemned “senior discount” method for undervaluing the lives of seniors in cost-benefit analyses, an approach even the Bush Administration was forced to disown.

Other work on regulatory policy issues by CPR Member Scholars includes:

  • Regulatory Underkill. One way to make sure that regulatory safeguards for health, safety and the environment don’t interfere with industry profits is to make sure the regulations aren’t very demanding. Read CPR’s Member Scholars writings on the subject of “Regulatory Underkill,” as well as on the White House Office of Management and Budget’s annual Report to Congress on the Costs and Benefits of Federal Regulation.
  • Regulatory Sabotage. Read more from CPR’s Member Scholars about specific methods used to undercut enforcement of the nation’s environmental, health and safety statutes.