Donald Trump is no stranger to leaving things worse off than he found them, and this is precisely what his administration now aims to do with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), not just one of the most successful government institutions in the history of the United States, but indeed the world. Having worked quickly, if not sloppily, to dismantle every vestige of the Obama administration's efforts to promote cleaner air and water, the Trump EPA is now heading down a path of self-destruction. The agency's proposed "benefits-busting" rule, released early last month, is a big part of this campaign.
The benefits-busting rule is nominally about overhauling how the EPA does cost-benefit analysis for its Clean Air Act rules, but make no mistake: This action is really about putting that foundational law into concrete boots and shoving it into the nearest body of water. Future efforts to fulfill its protective goals of promoting public health and environmental integrity will be defeated before they're even started.
The public interest community can and must fight back against this dangerous action. To support this effort, my colleagues and I have prepared a new memo that provides a topline analysis of the benefits-busting rule. As the memo explains, the thinly concealed objective of the benefits-busting rule is to rig cost-benefit analysis so that it is even more biased against protective safeguards. Specifically, it would change the methodology for conducting these analyses so as to overemphasize costs and make it even more difficult, if not impossible, to account for benefits. In reality, a rule might deliver huge public health and environmental benefits, save thousands of lives, prevent even more illnesses, and do it all for extremely reasonable costs. But on paper, under this scheme, the rule would look like a huge economic drain.
Worse still, the benefits-busting proposal seeks to weaponize the cost-benefit analysis process to make it easier for corporate polluters to successfully challenge Clean Air Act rules in court. The proposal doesn't just establish an excessively burdensome, one-size-fits-all set of analytical requirements that EPA must follow for its rules; it would also codify them as an enforceable regulation. So, even a minor deviation from these requirements could give industry all the ammunition it needs to block any rule it finds inconvenient to its bottom line.
If the strategy behind the benefits-busting proposal sounds familiar, that's because the Trump EPA has already drawn from this page of the anti-safeguards playbook with its "censored science" rule. In that action, the agency sought to rig what kind of science it could use as means for systematically blocking future EPA safeguards. Given the influence that science and cost-benefit analysis wields in EPA's regulatory implementation efforts, the combined effect of these two rules would all but render the agency impotent. And the Clean Air Act itself would be reduced to mere words on paper.
There's a theme here, of course. Under Donald Trump, the EPA is focused on liberating polluters from statutory requirements that they prevent or clean up their pollution, so that they can squeeze every last bit of profit out of their polluting practices. Of course, that profit comes at the cost of harming the environment and killing Americans whose only complicity is to draw breath or drink water. When Trump and his people talk about reducing regulatory costs, it's important to remember that somebody's paying the bill for industry's pollution one way or another: Either industry pays to clean it up, or Americans pay with their health and lives.
I encourage public interest allies to take action against the benefits-busting proposal by submitting comments and telling their own stories about the dangers it would pose. Our hope is that the analysis memo supports these efforts. Comments may be submitted online at regulations.gov and are due by midnight on Monday, August 3. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to me at this address.
Showing 2,817 results
James Goodwin | July 22, 2020
Donald Trump is no stranger to leaving things worse off than he found them, and this is precisely what his administration now aims to do with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), not just one of the most successful government institutions in the history of the United States, but indeed the world. Having worked quickly, if not sloppily, to dismantle every vestige of the Obama administration's efforts to promote cleaner air and water, the Trump EPA is now heading down a path of self-destruction. The agency's proposed "benefits-busting" rule, released early last month, is a big part of this campaign.
Alexandra Klass | July 21, 2020
In late June, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison acted in the state's tradition of guarding the public interest when he filed a consumer protection lawsuit against three of the nation’s largest fossil fuel entities — ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, and the American Petroleum Institute (API). In the lawsuit, he seeks to recover civil penalties and restitution for the harm to Minnesotans caused by these companies’ decades-long efforts to intentionally mislead the public about the relationship between fossil fuels, the climate crisis, and the resulting harm to public health, agriculture, infrastructure, and the environment.
Katlyn Schmitt | July 21, 2020
The Maryland Department of the Environment recently issued a general discharge permit that covers pollution from most livestock farms, including concentrated animal feeding operations, across the state through July 2025. Unfortunately, the permit, which went into effect on July 8th, will likely jeopardize the 2025 nitrogen reduction goals under the Chesapeake Bay Total Maximum Daily Load and does not align with Maryland’s Phase III Watershed Implementation Plan commitments.
Darya Minovi | July 13, 2020
Nine months ago, residents of the Chicago suburb of Willowbrook, Illinois, scored a major victory in their fight to prevent emissions of a dangerous gas, ethylene oxide, into the air they breathe. In fact, their victory appeared to have ripple effects in other communities. But like so many other aspects of life in the midst of a pandemic, things changed in a hurry.
Michael C. Duff | July 2, 2020
Workers' compensation was created as a means to an end and not an end in itself. It addressed the outrageous frequency of workplace injury and death caused by railroads in the late 19th/early 20th century. The unholy trinity of employers' affirmative tort defenses – assumption of the risk, contributory negligence, and the fellow servant rule – meant that workers or their survivors were not being compensated adequately or, in many cases, not at all. For this reason, expert American investigators were dispatched to Europe between 1909 and 1911 to study the existing workers' compensation systems there. Our current system was the result.
Alice Kaswan | July 1, 2020
When California adopted its first-in-the-nation regulations requiring truck electrification on June 25, the state took a step (or drove a mile) toward reducing pollution in the nation's most vulnerable communities. The new regulation exemplifies a key feature of California's approach: its integration of climate goals, clean air goals, and, at least in this case, environmental justice goals.
Katie Tracy | June 19, 2020
Until this week, laws in a majority of U.S. states permitted some form of employment discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. On Monday, the law changed – dramatically, sweepingly, historically – when the U.S. Supreme Court made clear that in this respect the 1964 Civil Rights Act's anti-employment discrimination provisions mean exactly what they say. The Court's ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia makes clear that it is illegal to base employment decisions – hiring and firing, the allocation of work, the grouping of employees, compensation practices, harassment – on sexual orientation or identity. The prior patchwork of state laws – most of which permitted some type of employment discrimination based on orientation or identity – is no more.
William Buzbee | June 19, 2020
On June 18, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Trump administration's rescission of the Obama administration's immigration relief program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). In explaining and then defending its DACA rollback, the Trump administration had raised an array of claims that, if accepted, would have undercut numerous regulatory rule of law fundamentals. Instead, the Court strengthened these longstanding requirements. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) v. Regents will become central to battles over the many Trump administration rollbacks and reversals of environmental and other regulations.
Darya Minovi | June 18, 2020
A blog post published last month by the Chesapeake Bay Program, a collaborative partnership focused on Bay restoration, addressed the many ways that the climate crisis will affect farms in the region. Data from the program shows temperatures on Maryland’s Lower Eastern Shore, home to a high concentration of industrial poultry farms, increased between 2 to 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit, on average, between 1901 and 2017. By 2080, temperatures in the Chesapeake Bay watershed are projected to increase by 4.5 to 10 degrees, posing a serious risk of heat stress to farmworkers and livestock.