Yesterday, the Hill published an op-ed by Center for Progressive Reform Scholar Joel A. Mintz entitled, "The Government Shutdown and the EPA: the Environmental Dangers of Congressional Recklessness."
It can be read in full here.
According to Mintz:
The indefinite close down of EPA’s operations poses major risks, some imminent and others long term, to the health and natural environment of millions of Americans.
The EPA’s enforcement of existing regulations provides vital protections against the emission of toxic air and water pollutants and the contamination of public drinking water supplies. The EPA works to prevent the exposure of school children to asbestos, the ingestion of toxic lead paint by infants, and the release of poisonous chemicals from long-abandoned hazardous waste dumps. The Agency also works to guard against the destruction of fish, shellfish and other aquatic life. In addition, the EPA supplies much-needed grant money to state and local environmental agencies—entities that (in many cases) are already starved of the financial resources necessary to carry out their tasks. Due to the government shut down, nearly all of the important EPA work of enforcing these safeguards, and the channeling of federal funds to the states, is now at a standstill.
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Erin Kesler | October 9, 2013
Yesterday, the Hill published an op-ed by Center for Progressive Reform Scholar Joel A. Mintz entitled, “The Government Shutdown and the EPA: the Environmental Dangers of Congressional Recklessness.” It can be read in full here. According to Mintz: The indefinite close down of EPA’s operations poses major risks, some imminent and others long term, to the […]
Erin Kesler | October 8, 2013
Last Friday, Executive Order 12866, which governs the work of OMB’s regulatory review arm, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) reached its 20th anniversary. Center for Progressive Reform scholars marked the anniversary by examining the Order’s reach and OIRA’s influence on the regulatory process including on the issues of transparency, timeliness and the […]
Robert Verchick | October 7, 2013
Ever wonder how Professor Tom McGarity knows about all those delays in regulatory review? Or how Professor Lisa Heinzerling learns about food safety regulations that the White House appears to be burying? Well, now you too can be an OIRA ninja. In President Obama’s first term, the White House introduced an interactive Web portal stocked […]
Rena Steinzor | October 4, 2013
A series of catastrophic regulatory failures have focused attention on the weakened condition of regulatory agencies assigned to protect public health, worker and consumer safety, and the environment. The destructive convergence of funding shortfalls, political attacks, and outmoded legal authority have set the stage for ineffective enforcement, unsupervised industry self-regulation, and a slew of devastating […]
Sidney A. Shapiro | October 3, 2013
As indicated by the 20th anniversary of Executive Order 12866, which guides the workings of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) at OMB, OIRA has become a fixture of the regulatory landscape. OIRA review of proposed rules is problematic, as other blogs in this series have indicated. In the Obama administration, however, this […]
David Driesen | October 3, 2013
This blog explains why President Obama should exempt proposals to mitigate climate disruption by reducing greenhouse gas emissions from OIRA review. First, the procedure that justifies OIRA review, cost-benefit analysis (CBA), just does not work for climate disruption measures. Second, CBA undermines just and legal climate policy. Third, climate disruption poses special risks that make […]
Nina Mendelson | October 3, 2013
On this 20th anniversary of the regulatory review regime of Executive Order 12,866, the appropriate thing to do would be to take stock. Has centralized regulatory review, on balance, improved the quality of federal regulation or interfered with it? Is this now-extensive regulatory review process worth it, given its costs? Sadly, the opaque quality of the process […]
Amy Sinden | October 2, 2013
It was 20 years ago this week that President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 12866. That was a watershed of sorts, because it marked the adoption by a Democratic administration of a key aspect of President Reagan’s anti-regulatory agenda — the requirement that all major federal regulations undergo cost-benefit analysis. This was not a move that […]
Thomas McGarity | October 2, 2013
The origins of Executive Order 12866 go all the way back to the Nixon and Ford Administrations. Soon after the enactment of the Occupational Safety and Health Act and the Clean Air and Water Acts, affected industries began to complain bitterly about the burdens the new wave of public interest statutes imposed on them. The […]