The Obama Administration struck a blow for transparency last week with the launch of an online dashboard allowing users to keep track of what the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs is working on. Good for OIRA for making such information so readily available. CPR plans to put it to good use.
This month we began an initiative of our own, CPR’s Eye on OIRA project. As the name suggests, we plan to keep careful tabs on what OIRA’s doing, what regs it has before it, how long they’ve been there, which lobbyists are meeting with which OIRA staff, whether OIRA is sticking to its deadlines, and what the end result of OIRA’s involvement turns out to be. The hard truth is that, even in the Obama Administration, OIRA is where industry focuses its efforts to weaken needed regulations. OIRA seems to think that’s appropriate, which is why CPR intends to apply heightened scrutiny.
One example of the value of such efforts is the recent and ongoing dust-up over EPA’s effort to regulate coal ash. We’ve written a lot about it on CPRBlog, but the essential facts are that the coal power plant industry and coal ash reuse industries have been lobbying OIRA night and day for the last few months, trying to head off an EPA regulation on how to deal with coal ash that is not safely recycled. Right now the toxic stuff is stored in large outdoor “containment areas,” which sounds a lot better than “holes in the ground,” which is what they basically are. EPA sent a draft of a proposal to OIRA in October, and OIRA was supposed to spend no more than 90 days working it over. But OIRA extended its review period by 30 days – something the controlling Executive Order allows it to do. Then OIRA appears to have missed that deadline, too, something the Executive Order does not allow it to do, at least not without EPA asking it to hold the proposal hostage for a while longer.
During the Bush Administration, OIRA got in the habit of sitting on regulations just as long as it pleased, regardless of deadlines. That muscle memory persists, now 13 months into the Obama Administration. The coal ash deadline long gone, OIRA and EPA appear to be locked in negotiation over the proposal – a proposal that has not yet seen the light of day, by the way, an indication of why the push for transparency and scrutiny is both important and incomplete.
We know as much as we do about the coal ash saga because we’ve been keeping track, piecing together tidbits of information. OIRA doesn’t send out a lot of press releases announcing that it’s delaying action, watering down regs, meeting with industry lobbyists and so on. It usually does that sort of thing in the dark. CPR’s Eye on OIRA project is intended to focus a little more light on the agency.
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Matthew Freeman | February 23, 2010
The Obama Administration struck a blow for transparency last week with the launch of an online dashboard allowing users to keep track of what the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs is working on. Good for OIRA for making such information so readily available. CPR plans to put it to good use. This month we […]
Shana Campbell Jones | February 22, 2010
Ten years ago, after NHTSA received reports of numerous deaths and injuries linked to Firestone tires and Ford Explorers, Congress passed the TREAD Act, bolstering the authority of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to identify possible defects in vehicles and tires by collecting information (“early warning data”) from auto and tire manufacturers. The […]
Ben Somberg | February 22, 2010
Representatives Henry Waxman and Bart Stupak have released a batch of documents this afternoon on the day before their committee hearing on the Toyota debacle. Their focus is largely on the issue of the possible role of electronic failures as a cause of sudden unintended acceleration cases. They criticized Toyota’s response to the reports of electronic problems, and in their […]
Rena Steinzor | February 22, 2010
Saturday’s Washington Post crystallized a trend of reporting in recent days showing that neither misaligned floor mats nor defective pedals are to blame for all acceleration problems in Toyota cars, at least not in the 2005 model Camry. The car, which has neither piece of offending equipment, does have electronic acceleration controls that are beginning […]
Holly Doremus | February 19, 2010
Cross-posted from Legal Planet. The past couple of weeks have been crazier than usual on the Bay-Delta. The pumps were first ramped up and then ramped down. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) pandered to the irrigation crowd (or at least a part of it) by proposing to ease endangered species protections in the Delta. And the […]
Daniel Farber | February 19, 2010
Cross-posted from Legal Planet. The Council on Environmental Quality has issued a draft guidance to agencies on treatment of greenhouse gases. The key point is that emissions exceeding 25,000 tons per year of CO2 will be considered a “significant environmental impact” and require preparation of an environmental impact statement. Overall, of course, this is a […]
Ben Somberg | February 18, 2010
Just to give you an idea of the scope of the situation in Tennessee: More than 3 million cubic yards of coal ash were released into the waterways in the Kingston coal ash disaster in late 2008. This week comes news from cleanup officials that the removal of that waste is 70 percent complete. The […]
James Goodwin | February 17, 2010
In 2008 alone, coal-fired power plants produced some 136 million tons of coal ash waste – dangerous stuff, because it contains arsenic, cadmium, mercury, and a host of other toxins that are a significant threat to basic human health. Ironically, coal ash has been growing as a problem in recent years in part because better […]
Ben Somberg | February 15, 2010
The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel had its latest article on BPA this weekend, this time looking at the role of the December 22 meeting between the industry and OIRA. Writer Meg Kissinger contrasts the forceful EPA statements on BPA from last year with the lack of an EPA action plan on the chemical now. As for the […]