On Tuesday, Senators Susan Collins (R-ME) and Claire McCaskill (D-MO) introduced the Bipartisan Jobs Creation Act, legislation that offers a number of proposals for jump-starting the economy. The bill includes two provisions that would hobble the regulatory system without generating the new jobs that the Senators seek. If these provisions were enacted, the bill would block regulatory safeguards that protect all Americans and our environment. The bill’s regulatory provisions would make it harder for the EPA and other regulatory agencies to implement congressional legislation designed to clean up our air and water, make our food safer, and reduce avoidable workplace hazards.
The regulatory provisions in the Collins-McCaskill bill are a nod to Republicans’ specious claim that “excessive regulation” is holding back job growth. One provision would delay EPA’s rule limiting hazardous air pollutants from commercial and industrial boilers by 15 months, and prevent the agency from issuing regulations that are as strong as the Clean Air Act currently requires. This regulation is already more than a decade overdue, and, once implemented, would prevent thousands of premature deaths and non-fatal heart attacks every year. They didn’t call it the “more mercury pollution bill”, but that’s what it effectively is.
The other deregulatory provision—based on the CURB Act, a bill introduced earlier this year by Sen. Collins—would add several new procedural requirements to the regulatory process, which would effectively block or delay critical safeguards. The bill would require agencies to conduct detailed cost-benefit analyses—including the impossible requirement of measuring "indirect effects"—before it could issue new rules. Most environmental, health and safety statutes rightly require protecting the public to levels that make these analyses irrelevant under the law, and would serve only to delay regulations while agencies completed the required analysis. Another requirement would require agencies to conduct lengthy analyses before issuing “guidance documents.” These documents can come in several forms, and regulated industry often welcomes them, because they help reduce regulatory uncertainty. Delaying or blocking these documents will only waste limited government resources, and make it harder for industry to comply with regulations.
While these provisions might be useful in attracting the support of Republican Senators, because they make it more difficult to promulgate needed regulations, they are unlikely to create jobs. I noted recently, no less than the head of the Congressional Budget Office, Director Douglas Elmendorf, has testified that anti-regulatory policies, such as those in the Collins-McCaskill bill, will probably not lead to job growth, and may even backfire, sinking the economy more and worsening unemployment.
Sen. McCaskill didn’t get that message, or, perhaps with an eye toward a tough upcoming re-election challenge, chose to ignore it. I hope the other Democratic Members of the Senate don’t follow her lead and join the erroneous anti-regulatory campaign.
Showing 2,833 results
Sidney A. Shapiro | December 7, 2011
On Tuesday, Senators Susan Collins (R-ME) and Claire McCaskill (D-MO) introduced the Bipartisan Jobs Creation Act, legislation that offers a number of proposals for jump-starting the economy. The bill includes two provisions that would hobble the regulatory system without generating the new jobs that the Senators seek. If these provisions were enacted, the bill would […]
Sidney A. Shapiro | December 7, 2011
Within the last hour, the House of Representatives approved the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act – the REINS Act. The bill was among House Republicans’ top priorities for the year, and they’ve made it and a series of other anti-regulatory bills a centerpiece of their agenda. The plain purpose of the […]
Isaac Shapiro | December 7, 2011
Cross-posted from the Economic Policy Institute’s Working Economics blog. Isaac Shapiro is EPI’s Director of Regulatory Policy Research. The House of Representatives is poised to vote for the REINS (Regulations From the Executive in Need of Scrutiny) bill today; this would come on top of votes on two bills last week that would also upend […]
Rena Steinzor | December 6, 2011
Booth Goodwin, the U.S. Attorney for the southern district of West Virginia, and Attorney General Eric Holder announced today a landmark settlement with Alpha Natural Resources, the coal company that bought out its rival Massey Energy after a catastrophic explosion deep within the Big Branch mine killed 29 miners. Alpha recently announced that its third […]
Rena Steinzor | December 6, 2011
New York Times columnist David Brooks weighs in this morning on CPR’s latest report, Behind Closed Doors at the White House: How Politics Trumps Protection of Health, Worker Safety and the Environment. To his credit, he begins by dismissing one of congressional Republicans’ principal lines of argument for 2011 – that an imagined tsunami of […]
Ben Somberg | December 2, 2011
The CPR white paper on OIRA earlier this week looked at how this little office within OMB facilitates an industry-dominated process that serves to weaken regulations proposed by federal agencies. Appearances by industry representatives have outnumbered those by public interest lobbyists more than 5-to-1 in meetings at OIRA in the last ten years, the paper […]
Ben Somberg | December 1, 2011
The “Regulatory Flexibility Improvements Act” (RFIA) and the “Regulatory Accountability Act” (RAA) are headed for votes on the House floor shortly (today and/or tomorrow). The “Gum Up Public Health and Safety Protections Act” apparently wasn’t going to sell as well. A quick recap of the Regulatory Accountability Act, via CPR Member Scholar Sidney Shapiro’s Congressional testimony […]
Matt Shudtz | December 1, 2011
This week OSHA expanded a two-year-old enforcement program aimed at preventing catastrophic release of highly hazardous chemicals—the type of headline-grabbing event that ruined thousands of lives in Bhopal in 1984 and was narrowly avoided in West Virginia in 2008. Originally targeted at just three regions (and optional for state-plan states in those regions), the National […]
Robert Adler | November 30, 2011
When the U.S. Supreme Court hears oral argument in PPL Montana, L.L.C v. State of Montana on December 7, it will consider issues of constitutional history dating to the early days of the American Republic and legal sources that some claim (and others dispute) trace to Magna Charta and the Institutes of Justinian in Roman law. […]