This op-ed was originally published by The Regulatory Review. Click to read the full text.
When the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland, collapsed after it was struck by a container ship, six construction workers were killed. According to estimates made at the time, the state of Maryland could lose up to $15 million a day in revenue as containers are routed to rival ports. The cost of replacing the bridge, a process that will take years, is expected to exceed $1.5 billion.
The Key Bridge collapse was avoidable. In 1991, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials issued a guide for designing over-water bridges “to minimize their susceptibility to damage from vessel collisions.” The guide recommended that bridges built before 1991 undergo vulnerability assessments to identify and respond to the risk of a catastrophic collapse from a vessel collision, even though federal law only requires such assessments for bridges built later.
The Maryland Transportation Authority never conducted a vulnerability assessment on the Key Bridge. After the collapse, the National Transportation Safety Board determined that if the state agency had conducted one, it would have found that the bridge’s risk level was almost 30 times greater than the Association’s risk threshold for critical or essential bridges.
The vulnerability assessment that might have averted the Key Bridge tragedy is a form of risk assessment. Risk assessment is the process of deciding how dangerous the subject of an evaluation is. If a risk assessment indicates that something poses unacceptably high risks, the public or private entity conducting the assessment can identify and select among available options to reduce the risk. Risk assessment alleviates ignorance, and ignorance of the kind that preceded the Key Bridge collapse is most decidedly not bliss. What we do not know can hurt us.
Many risks to public health, safety, and the environment are insufficiently understood. Indeed, what some scholars have referred to as “ignorance of mechanism” may be the defining characteristic of many of the nation’s most pressing environmental problems. The U.S. Congress has understood the significance of this uncertainty ever since the birth of modern environmental law in the United States around 1970. One goal of the federal Clean Air Act, enacted that year, is “to initiate and accelerate a national research and development program to achieve the prevention and control of air pollution.” Congress later recognized that the manufacturing, distribution, use, or disposal of some chemical substances “may present an unreasonable risk of injury to health or the environment.” It therefore endorsed a national policy that “adequate information should be developed with respect to the effect of chemical substances and mixtures on health and the environment.”
Over the years, Congress delegated to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the authority and responsibility to fill in the gaps in our understanding of the health risks posed by human interactions with the environment and to adopt and enforce regulations to reduce any risks EPA deemed unacceptable.
For much of its 55-year existence, EPA has performed those tasks admirably. Through its own research, research it has funded through grants to university and private institutions, and the mandates it has imposed on risk-creating businesses, EPA has accumulated a trove of information that has allowed it to identify and respond to some of the nation’s most pressing environmental problems. Notwithstanding those efforts, scientific uncertainty continues to characterize many environmental issues.
Tragically, today’s EPA, under the leadership of Administrator Lee Zeldin and at the direction of President Donald J. Trump, no longer seems interested in fortifying the information infrastructure needed to understand environmental problems and enable the agency to address public health or environmental risks effectively. With remarkable speed, EPA has undercut its own ability, and the ability of scientific experts outside the agency, to provide the information needed to support risk-reducing activity by the government or the private sector. Indeed, EPA seems determined to squelch any efforts to generate information about environmental risks and to cast doubt on the legitimacy of anyone else’s risk assessment endeavors.
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Robert L. Glicksman | May 1, 2025
Many risks to public health, safety, and the environment are insufficiently understood. Indeed, what some scholars have referred to as “ignorance of mechanism” may be the defining characteristic of many of the nation’s most pressing environmental problems. The U.S. Congress has understood the significance of this uncertainty ever since the birth of modern environmental law in the United States around 1970.
James Goodwin | April 30, 2025
A helpful way to think about the “Mandate for Leadership”—the radical policy blueprint laid out as part of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—is as a kind of “political time capsule” reflecting the world as conservatives saw it in April 2023, when the document was first published. Bearing this in mind is important, because that world was very different from the one 19 months later, when President Donald Trump secured his reelection—or even the one on his second Inauguration Day, nearly two years after the mandate was released.
Bryan Dunning, Federico Holm | April 29, 2025
In April, the Trump administration published an executive order (EO) boosting the coal industry in hopes of a grand revival for an energy source that has been in stark decline since more cost-effective sources, including gas and renewables, drove it from its peak nearly two decades ago. Included in this order was a two-year exemption to a rule that would have required some of the country’s most polluting power plants to reduce emissions of mercury and other hazardous air pollutants that harm our health.
Federico Holm | April 28, 2025
Since our last update (April 21), we have seen some important developments regarding Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolutions. So far, three resolutions have become law and four more have cleared both chambers. Although we have not received any information that these will be sent to the president’s desk in the coming days, we continue to monitor their status as they could soon be on the move. The most consequential development is the announcement that House Republicans will press ahead and vote on three resolutions that target waivers granted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the state of California to develop vehicle emissions guidelines.
Daniel Farber | April 24, 2025
It’s a tribute to the significance of state climate policies that President Donald Trump devoted an entire executive order to excoriating them as “fundamentally irreconcilable” with his own, fossil fuel-promoting energy policy. Yet, despite all the drama in DC, state governments have continued to make quiet progress in their efforts to expand clean energy and phase out fossil fuels. These states are focused on tangible steps forward, not on capturing online clicks, so their efforts may escape notice. But the cumulative effect of these month-by-month, smaller-scale initiatives is significant.
James Goodwin | April 23, 2025
On April 23, the Trump administration formally published a rulemaking proposal in the Federal Register that would lay the legal groundwork for creating a new category of civil service personnel called “Schedule Policy/Career” — better known as “Schedule F.” Long anticipated, this policy would strip civil service employees of century-old employment protections, effectively making them “at will” employees, much like a president’s political appointees.
Sophie Loeb | April 23, 2025
As North Carolinians continue to grapple with rolling blackouts, rising energy bills, and recovery from a once-in-a-generation hurricane event, another pending environmental catastrophe is developing in our backyards. On Monday, May 5, the North Carolina Utilities Commission will hold a public hearing to gather feedback on Duke Energy’s plans to build a second new methane gas power plant near its existing coal plant on Hyco Lake in Person County as part of the state’s decarbonization plan.
Federico Holm | April 21, 2025
Since our last update (April 7), we have seen some important developments regarding Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolutions. In addition to the two resolutions signed into law on March 15 (easing protections that will mostly benefit the fossil fuel industry), one more resolution has become law.
Bryan Dunning | April 16, 2025
On April 8, the Trump administration issued the “Protecting American Energy From State Overreach” executive order (EO), another in a blitz of orders and declarations focused on the energy sector. As with the other energy-related EOs, it contains numerous references to advancing so-called “energy dominance” — which is largely and ideologically focused on fossil fuel industries — despite the United States already being “dominant” in this sector.