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This morning, CPR Member Scholar Tom McGarity testifies at the Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works on “Strengthening Public Health Protections by Addressing Toxic Chemical Threats.” His testimony can be found in full here. McGarity contributed the following blog post in advance of the hearing.  The Chemical Safety Improvement Act: The Wrong Way to […]

Lost among the high-profile opinions that the Supreme Court issued during the past two weeks was a case that attracted little media attention, but is of great importance to the millions of Americans who take generic drugs. Karen Bartlett, a secretary for an insurance company filed the lawsuit against generic drug manufacturer Mutual Pharmaceutical Company. […]

Next Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Mutual Pharmaceutical Co. v. Bartlett, a case that raises once again the troubling question of whether federal regulatory agencies should trump local juries in common law tort actions.  The precise question at issue is whether the fact that the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) […]

Ed. Note: This post is a reprint, with minor updates, of McGarity’s post one year ago on the first anniversary of the proposed silica rule arriving at OMB. Little has happened on the issue in the past year – except more people have been sickened or killed by silica exposure. Today marks the second anniversary […]

When I teach my environmental law and food safety law students how to go about ascertaining the meaning of implementing regulations, I tell them to start with the sections of the regulations devoted to definitions and exemptions.  Quite frequently the most hard-fought controversies during the rulemaking process through which the agency promulgated the regulations were […]

This post was written by Member Scholar Thomas O. McGarity and Senior Policy Analyst Matt Shudtz. The Mercatus Center has recently published a report on OSHA that simply rehashes the same old discredited arguments that industry apologists in academia and think tanks have been making for thirty years.  Not surprisingly, they reach the conclusion that […]

The saga of the missing FDA food safety regulations continues with a new government filing in a lawsuit challenging FDA’s failure to promulgate regulations implementing three critical programs that Congress established in the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2011.  As I noted in a previous posting, the three sets of regulations are currently bottled up […]

One of the crowning legislative achievements of the Obama Administration’s first term was the enactment of the Food Safety Modernization Act.  Like any safety statute, however, the new law will have no practical bite until the implementing rules are issued. In this case, that’s until the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) promulgates regulations fleshing out […]

In the week before Christmas last year, 14-year-old Anais Fournier went to Valley Mall in Hagerstown, Maryland with some friends.  While there she purchased and consumed a 24-ounce can of an energy drink manufactured by the Monster Beverage Corporation.  She returned to the mall the next day and consumed another Monster energy drink.  Later that […]