Claudia Rodgers, Deputy Chief Council for the Office of Advocacy at the U.S. Small Business Administration, testified earlier this month at a hearing conducted by a House Oversight and Government Reform sub-committee. The session ("Assessing The Impact of Greenhouse Gas Regulations on Small Business") was a sparsely attended affair on all sides of the room. But something important happened.
Rep. Jackie Speier asked Rodgers a series of questions (at 1:03:30 in the video) about the Office of Advocacy’s oft-cited report from September, by economists Nicole Crain and Mark Crain, which claims that the cost of regulations in the U.S. in 2008 was $1.75 trillion dollars. Representative Speier cited CPR’s recent report debunking the study. In response, Rodgers mostly gave little new information, telling Speier she'd get back to her. But then there was this:
Rep. Speier:
... Ms. Rodgers, does your office have the data used in the Crain and Crain study, and if so, will you please make that data available to us?
Rodgers:
I will check and see if our office has the data, would make available to you. I do know that it is... I'm told that it is available through Crain and Crain on their website, or through their website, that they have made it available. When we contract out studies, our office is not required to ask of that data and make it publicly available ...
Problem is, if it is somewhere on their website, no one's been able to find it.
The authors of CPR's paper critiquing the Crain and Crain study weren't the only ones who weren't able to get all the data after a request. As the Economic Policy Institute noted in its paper last week on regulatory costs,
The Economic Policy Institute has tried to use the information in the Crain and Crain paper on the authors’ modeling approach in order to replicate their results. Repeated efforts to do so have so far failed. Efforts to obtain further background data from Crain and Crain on the approach they used, which researchers typically provide to one another, have also so far failed.
So, here’s a tip to the SBA's Office of Advocacy: Better get that letter of correction off to the Committee pronto. Members of Congress don’t like it when agency witnesses testify to things that turn out to be not quite true.
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Ben Somberg | April 19, 2011
Claudia Rodgers, Deputy Chief Council for the Office of Advocacy at the U.S. Small Business Administration, testified earlier this month at a hearing conducted by a House Oversight and Government Reform sub-committee. The session ("Assessing The Impact of Greenhouse Gas Regulations on Small Business") was a sparsely attended affair on all sides of the room. […]
Amy Sinden | April 18, 2011
In politics, repeating something over and over again can sometimes make it stick, whether it’s true or not. From Reagan’s welfare queens, to the specter of “socialized” medicine leading to imminent communist takeover, these sorts of myths often start on the far right but then move surprisingly far to the center. And as the EPA […]
Sidney A. Shapiro | April 15, 2011
Congress charged the Office of Advocacy of the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) with the job of representing the interests of small business before regulatory agencies, such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). As an agency of the federal government, it has an obligation to taxpayers to get its facts straight before it speaks. Lately, […]
Celeste Monforton | April 13, 2011
Cross-posted from The Pump Handle. President Obama received an award last week for his efforts to improve openness in federal agencies. Jon Stewart poked fun at it (see clip) and I actually thought it might have been an April Fool’s joke because of what I’d learned earlier in the week. The President’s own Office of […]
Matthew Freeman | April 13, 2011
CPR Member Scholar John Echeverria was on Capitol Hill yesterday, testifying before the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on the Constitution. His topic was a proposed bill from Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI) to impose federal limits on state and local use of eminent domain – the authority to condemn private property so that it can be […]
Yee Huang | April 12, 2011
Today CPR releases Making Good Use of Adaptive Management, a white paper explaining the basic principles of adaptive management and highlighting best practices for implementing and applying it to natural resources management. Over the last two decades, natural resource scientists, managers, and policymakers have employed adaptive management of land and natural resources. The approach calls for […]
Dan Rohlf | April 8, 2011
A student-run environmental group operating out of a 150-square-foot office at Lewis and Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon has an important lesson to teach congressional Republicans. In 2004, the Northwest Environmental Defense Center – a small group with an annual budget of a few thousand dollars and a single staff member – secured more […]
Matthew Freeman | April 7, 2011
This afternoon at 1:00 p.m., the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Energy and Power will check one more box in the House GOP’s ongoing effort to demonstrate its appreciation to the corporate interests that helped elect them, by holding a hearing on a proposal disingenuously called the Transparency in Regulatory Analysis of Impacts […]
Ben Somberg | April 6, 2011
When the U.S. Small Business Administration issued a study last September claiming regulations cost the U.S. economy $1.75 Trillion in a single year, the agency trumpeted that the "report was peer reviewed consistent with the Office of Advocacy’s data quality guidelines." But the peer review file included with the study was embarrassingly meager — comments […]