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CPR, Allies Call on Trump Administration to Hold Open Public Comment Process during COVID-19 Pandemic

Earlier this week, a group of 25 Center for Progressive Reform (CPR) Board Members, Member Scholars, and staff signed a joint letter urging Russell Vought, Acting Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), to direct federal agencies to hold open active public comment periods for pending rulemakings amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The letter further urges Vought to extend comment periods for at least 30 days beyond the end of the crisis.

Meaningful public participation is one of the bedrock principles upon which our regulatory system is based. Among other things, by enlisting the dispersed expertise of the public, it ensures higher-quality regulatory decision-making, and it imbues the process and its results with a crucial measure of credibility and legitimacy.

This goal of meaningful public participation is most notably enshrined in the Administrative Procedure Act’s requirement that agencies provide members of the public with the opportunity to offer their ideas on a proposed rule by submitting “written data, views, or arguments.” This is no mere paper exercise. Courts require agencies to demonstrate that they have not just solicited comments by engaging with this public feedback in a thoughtful way as they work toward a final rule.

Needless to say, the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic will prevent members of the public from effectively availing themselves of this opportunity. Moreover, to press ahead with open public comment periods could risk putting agency personnel in harm’s way by unnecessarily exposing them to the virus.

Instead of working on non-essential regulations, the Trump administration’s agencies should be exploring ways to redeploy their resources toward aiding the broader response effort. This situation calls for all hands on deck.

This may sound like a drastic step for agencies to take, but a crisis of this magnitude requires a proportionally large response. Besides, as the letter notes, Vought should still permit agencies to make use of the APA’s emergency rulemaking procedures and to pursue expeditiously any active rulemakings that are subject to legal deadlines or for which delays would result in undue harm to public health or safety. This approach would allow agencies to contribute to the COVID-19 response without unduly sacrificing progress on their public interest mission.

In addition, public interest organizations led by CPR have submitted a separate letter that likewise calls on Vought to hold open active public comment periods for pending rulemakings. This letter was signed by a diverse group of 170 public interest, labor, and grassroots organizations representing millions of Americans.

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James Goodwin | March 19, 2020

CPR, Allies Call on Trump Administration to Hold Open Public Comment Process during COVID-19 Pandemic

Earlier this week, a group of 25 Center for Progressive Reform (CPR) Board Members, Member Scholars, and staff signed a joint letter urging Russell Vought, Acting Director of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), to direct federal agencies to hold open active public comment periods for pending rulemakings amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The letter further urges Vought to extend comment periods for at least 30 days beyond the end of the crisis.

Daniel Farber | March 18, 2020

Presidential Power in a Pandemic

Now that President Trump has belatedly declared a national emergency, what powers does he have to respond to the coronavirus pandemic? There has been a lot of talk about this on the Internet, some of it off-base. It's important to get the law straight. For instance, there's been talk about whether Trump should impose a national curfew, but I haven't been able to find any legal authority for doing that so far. The legal discussion of this issue is still at an early stage, but here are some of the major sources of power and how they might play out.

Alexandra Klass | March 18, 2020

Public Lands and Just Energy Transitions

Our vast public lands and waters are both a major contributor to the global climate crisis and a potential solution to the problem. The extraction and use of oil and gas resources from public lands and waters produce 20 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. If the public lands were its own nation, it would be the fifth largest global emitter of GHGs. The scale of this problem has been exacerbated by the current administration.

Karen Sokol | March 16, 2020

Trump’s Bungling of Coronavirus Response Mirrors His Approach to Climate Crisis

"This report is a catalogue of weather in 2019 made more extreme by climate change, and the human misery that went with it." That is the statement of Brian Hoskins, chair of Imperial College in London's Grantham Institute for Climate Change, about the recently released State of the Climate in 2019 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the WMO compiles information from scientists all over the world that has been a key driver of international climate law and policymaking. One of the IPCC's reports was similarly dire to that of the WMO's, but not without hope.

Darya Minovi | March 12, 2020

Advocating for Sustainable Agriculture on Maryland’s Eastern Shore

On March 4, I joined community members and advocates from Assateague Coastal Trust, Center for a Livable Future, Environmental Integrity Project, Food and Water Watch, and NAACP to testify in favor of Maryland's House Bill 1312. The bill, introduced by Delegate Vaughn Stewart (D-Montgomery County), would place a moratorium on permits for new or expanding concentrated animal feed operations (CAFOs) in the state. The legislation would apply to "industrial poultry operations," defined as operations that produce 300,000 or more broiler chickens per year. It was introduced with strong support from community members and environmental and public health advocates hoping to pump the brakes on the seemingly unmitigated growth of poultry CAFOs, especially on the Eastern Shore.

Christine Klein, Sandra Zellmer | March 11, 2020

Still Flooding After All These Years

The flood season is upon us once again. Beginning in February, parts of Mississippi and Tennessee were deluged by floods described as "historic," "unprecedented," even "Shakespearean." At the same time, Midwestern farmers are still reeling from the torrential rains of 2019 that destroyed billions of dollars' worth of crops and equipment, while wondering whether their water-ravaged farmland can ever be put back into production. All this while the Houston area continues to recover from three so-called "500-year floods" in as many years, back-to-back in 2015, 2016, and, most notably, Hurricane Harvey in 2017.

Matt Shudtz | March 5, 2020

How Can Legal and Regulatory Enforcement Help Communities at Risk from the Climate Crisis?

From the farm fields of California to the low-lying neighborhoods along the shores of the Chesapeake Bay, structural racism and legally sanctioned inequities are combining with the effects of the climate crisis to put people in danger. The danger is manifest in heat stroke suffered by migrant farmworkers and failing sewer systems that back up into homes in formerly redlined neighborhoods. Fortunately, public interest attorneys across the country are attuned to these problems and are finding ways to use the law to force employers and polluters to adapt to the realities of the climate crisis.

John Leshy | March 5, 2020

Secretary Bernhardt Says He Doesn’t Have a Duty to Fight Climate Change. He’s Wrong.

With the help of the U.S. Congress, the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) has had a long and proud history of tackling pressing challenges through responsible and inclusive management of America's public lands. One might expect it would continue that tradition as climate change has become a major challenge confronting the nation. Not so. In fact, Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt has been doing more than any of his predecessors to promote fossil fuel development on America's public lands, all the while dancing around the issue of whether he has an obligation, or even the legal authority, to address climate change.

Karen Sokol | March 2, 2020

The Problem with the Climate Leadership Council’s Carbon Tax Plan

Earlier this year, on the heels of the Earth's hottest decade on record, a coalition of former government officials, fossil fuel companies, car manufacturers, financial companies, and nonprofit organizations renewed their endorsement of a national carbon tax as "the most effective climate solution" (emphasis added). And by "the," it appears that they mean "the only." The catch is that the coalition's legislative plan also calls for preventing the federal government from regulating carbon emissions and from taking any other protective measures "that are no longer necessary upon the enactment of a rising carbon fee." Given the scale and complexity of the planetary emergency that we face, it would certainly be nice if the solution were that simple. But that, of course, is too good to be true.