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The Regulatory Accountability Act: Or How to Defeat the Public Interest in Just 65 Easy Steps

Cue the majestic fanfare, for this week marks House Republicans’ so-called “Stop Government Abuse Week”—you know they mean business, because they have a clever Twitter hashtag and everything.   So how does one celebrate such an auspicious occasion?  Apparently, by wasting precious House floor time with a series of votes on several extreme anti-regulatory bills that, if enacted, would make it all but impossible for agencies to carry out their congressionally mandated missions of safeguarding the public against corporate abuses.  The jewel in this potentially catastrophic crown is the Regulatory Accountability Act, which has been repackaged as Title II of the overstuffed “Regnibus” bill, officially known as the All Economic Regulations are Transparent (ALERT) Act (H.R. 2804). 

If enacted, the Regulatory Accountability Act would subject the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, the Consumer Product Safety Commission and all other protector agencies to as many as 65 new procedural and analytical requirements when developing new regulations to implement the laws they administer.   If an agency wants to issue a regulation that is not “least cost,” then they have to comply with still more new requirements.  See here: I counted them myself, so you wouldn’t have to.  (The law actually includes 75 such requirements, but 10 are identical or similar to existing requirements.)  These requirements would come on top of the dozens of analyses and procedures that agencies must already undertake throughout the rulemaking process.  For a complete flowchart of those analyses and procedures, see here.  (For optimal readability, I highly recommend projecting this flowchart on the nearest available IMAX screen.)

It’s hard to overstate just how damaging the Regulatory Accountability Act’s new rulemaking requirements would be if they were to become law.  These new requirements would completely overhaul Section 553 of the Administrative Procedure Act, which outlines the general notice-and-comment rulemaking procedures that agencies must following when developing rules.  Though Section 553 takes up only a few pages of the United States Code, the changes that would be made to that section take up more than 16 of the Regnibus bill’s 87 pages.  All of these new procedures are carefully oriented toward wasting scarce agency resources, delaying critical safeguards, and forcing agencies to adopt inadequately protective regulations.

When testifying before the House Judiciary Committee in 2011, CPR Member Scholar Sid Shapiro conservatively estimated that the Regulatory Accountability Act’s new procedures would add at least two to three years to the rulemaking process.  Considering that it already takes agencies anywhere from four to eight years to complete many rules, the Regulatory Accountability Act would ensure that the biggest rulemakings could take up to twelve years to complete—the process could conceivably span four different presidential administrations!

Because compliance with the Regulatory Accountability Act’s myriad requirements would invariably force agencies to sacrifice protection of the public interest for minimizing the regulatory costs imposed on polluting industries, the few safeguards that do emerge from this process would be significantly weaker than Congress had originally intended.  If the Regulatory Accountability Act had been the law for the past few 40 years, it would be no exaggeration to say that many of the public safeguards we now take for granted—such as rules to eliminate lead in gasoline or to require airbags in automobiles—would have never seen the light of day.

Though just one part of one of the many anti-regulatory bills that will come to the House floor this week, the Regulatory Accountability Act clearly illustrates their collective goal:  an attempt to block the implementation of laws enacted by previous Congresses—including Wall Street reform, healthcare reform, and vital environmental laws—that an extremist minority faction in the current Congress does not happen to like.  They lack the votes in the Senate (and the necessary control of the White House) to repeal these laws, so congressional Republicans have launched a scorched earth campaign against the U.S. regulatory system in effort to block their implementation.  For a political party that has become so irretrievably lost to its own nihilism, it should be no surprise that congressional Republicans have concluded that the next best thing to repealing existing laws is to completely incapacitate the agencies charged with carrying them out.

As a country, we face too many difficult challenges to allow ourselves to become sidetracked by the kind of silly political games that the Regulatory Accountability Act represents.  If House Republicans refuse to be part of the solution to these challenges, then they should at least refrain from trying to throw up unnecessary roadblocks in front of those who would.

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James Goodwin | February 24, 2014

The Regulatory Accountability Act: Or How to Defeat the Public Interest in Just 65 Easy Steps

Cue the majestic fanfare, for this week marks House Republicans’ so-called “Stop Government Abuse Week”—you know they mean business, because they have a clever Twitter hashtag and everything.   So how does one celebrate such an auspicious occasion?  Apparently, by wasting precious House floor time with a series of votes on several extreme anti-regulatory bills that, […]

Rena Steinzor | February 20, 2014

North Carolina’s Coal Ash Spills: A Glimpse of the Future under OIRA’s Weak Option

Yesterday, we wrote about OIRA’s role in delaying and diluting the EPA’s long-awaited coal ash rule, in part by introducing and promoting a weak option that would rely on voluntary state implementation and citizen suits, instead of nationwide requirements and federal oversight, to protect the public from dangerous leaks and spills. Anyone who thinks the […]

Sandra Zellmer | February 20, 2014

A Win for Nebraska: Lancaster District Court Struck Down Governor’s Approval of Keystone Pipeline

A Lancaster County District Court has struck down the governor’s decision to approve Keystone XL’s pipeline route through the state in Thompson v. Heineman, CI 12-2060 (Feb. 19, 2014).  As described in a previous blog, LB 1161 was passed in 2012 to give Governor Dave Heineman the authority to approve the route rather than having […]

Rena Steinzor | February 19, 2014

Mounting Coal Ash Spills Will Be OIRA’s Legacy

Two and a half weeks ago, a Duke Energy ash pond in North Carolina spilled up to 39,000 tons of coal ash and 27 million gallons of contaminated water after a stormwater pipe underneath the pond broke. The spill coated the bottom of the Dan River for 70 miles with gray sludge—five feet thick in […]

William Funk | February 17, 2014

Executive Fiat or Business as Usual? Claims of Presidential Overreach are Just Politics

In his State of the Union Address President Obama announced that, while he intended to work with Congress to achieve various goals, he will act unilaterally, invoking his “executive authority,” pending congressional action.  There followed a laundry list of initiatives that he said he would take on his own.  Predictably, Republicans have railed against the […]

Thomas McGarity | February 12, 2014

CPR Member Scholars file Comments on OSHA’s Silica Proposal

At long last, the comment period on OSHA’s silica proposal has closed and the next phase in this rule’s protracted timeline will commence.  In the four months since OSHA released the proposal, the agency has received hundreds of comments.  They run the gamut, from the expected support of unions and other advocates for working people, […]

Matthew Freeman | February 11, 2014

CPR Scholars Weigh in on ‘Secret Science Reform Act’

A group of eight CPR Member Scholars today submitted a letter to Reps. David Schweikert and Suzanne Bonamici, the chair and ranking member, respectively, of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology’s Subcommittee on the Environment. The letter levels a series of powerful criticisms at Schweikert’s proposed “Secret Science Reform Act,” yet another in […]

Anne Havemann | February 7, 2014

The Bay-Wide TMDL is None of Alaska’s Business

Anchorage, Alaska is more than 4,000 miles away from the Chesapeake Bay, yet Alaska joined 20 other states on Monday in asking a federal appeals court to overturn the EPA-led plan to restore the Bay, known as a Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL). While Alaska’s interest in the Bay-wide TMDL is murky, the history of […]

Sidney A. Shapiro | February 7, 2014

Chemical Industry takes Aim at Citizen Suits with ‘Reform’ Bill

The recent chemical spill disaster in West Virginia has brought into sharp focus the weak measures we have in place for safeguarding people and the environment against exposures to harmful chemicals.  State and civil justice systems have helped to fill the resulting void by providing individuals who have suffered harmful exposures with an opportunity to […]