Beyond 12866: New CPR Initiative to Promote Administrative Agenda for Progressive Regulatory Reform
This week, CPR is launching its Beyond 12866 initiative, an online platform focused on promoting a progressive vision for rebuilding the U.S. regulatory system. Such a regulatory system will be essential not only to achieving the progressive vision of a more just and equitable society; it will also do the heavy practical lifting needed for implementing key elements of a progressive policy agenda, such as the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and Black Lives Matter movement.
This initiative begins from the recognition that in the near term, such progressive regulatory reform will need to be accomplished administratively, as opposed to legislatively, given the divisive politics of the issue and ongoing congressional dysfunction more generally. Using such administrative tools as executive orders and memoranda, the president in particular has considerable influence over how the regulatory system operates, and appropriately so given his (gendered language intended, unfortunately) position in our constitutional system.
Unfortunately, even nominally "liberal" presidents have wielded this influence in decidedly conservative, anti-regulatory ways.
Nowhere is this better exemplified than in Executive Order 12866, which along with the Administrative Procedure Act, essentially functions as a part of the "constitution" of our regulatory system. Put in place in 1993 …
This post was originally published on Legal Planet. Reprinted with permission.
The response to the COVID-19 pandemic has driven home some lessons about governance. Those lessons have broader application — for instance, to climate governance. We can't afford for the federal government to flunk Crisis Management 101 again.
Here are five key lessons:
- Effective leadership from the top is indispensable. Major problems require action by multiple federal agencies. These agencies need help coordinating; they may also need to be pushed into changing priorities and revamping procedures to deal with a major new issue. This is going to be very much true of climate policy. The trick is to provide leadership without hampering front-line agencies.
- Agency expertise is also indispensable. We've seen how decision-making in the White House has too often ignored the expertise of public health experts. The result is bad policy. Trump is extreme in this …
The Congressional Review Act (CRA) is a bad law and should be repealed. Yet, it has taken on outsized importance given that it provides one of the few vehicles for moving substantive legislation through a hyper-polarized Congress. The upcoming elections are thrusting it back in the spotlight, so let’s talk about the CRA and how opponents of the Trump administration’s assault on public safeguards might put it to its highest and best use.
First things first, though: The CRA only becomes viable if the Democrats sweep the presidential election and secure majorities in both chambers of Congress. Some polling suggests that the stars appear to be aligning in this fashion, just as they did at the beginning of the Trump administration when the full aggressive force of the CRA was first deployed. If this happens, that means any rules issued “late enough” in the Trump …
This post was originally published by American Rivers. Reprinted with permission.
I have a confession: I didn’t used to “get” environmental justice. I admit that not as an inadequate apology to those of you who have lived with environmental injustice or dedicated your lives to fighting it, but instead as an invitation to others to join my journey toward greater understanding.
I have cared about the environment for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I explored Shenandoah National Park with my parents and brother. Since high school, my favorite pastimes have involved outdoor adventures. I still enjoy scaring my mom by picking up snakes (sorry mom!); I revel in the feeling of stretching out in a sleeping bag after a long day on a trail; I love teaching my kids to climb rocks and roll kayaks. I can’t remember a time when …
This afternoon, Science magazine is publishing an article [abstract available, article itself behind paywall] I co-authored with a number of distinguished environmental science professors from around the country. The article dissects the rule and shows the remarkable disregard for science that the Trump administration displayed in its recent dismantling of the 2015 Clean Water Rule, which protected millions of miles of rivers and acres of wetlands from polluters.
The article makes clear that the Trump administration’s Navigable Waters Protection Rule (NWPR), which just went into effect in June, has gutted protections for whole categories of waters despite the Clean Water Act’s express mandate that regulators protect the “chemical, physical, and biological integrity” of the nation's waters.
The scientist co-authors show how the new deregulatory action ignores or downplays what the best science establishes about the connectivity and functions of waters previously protected. The Obama-era rule …
This post was originally published by the Yale Journal on Regulation's Notice & Comment blog. Reprinted with permission.
In 1958, civil rights leaders, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Andrew Young, met in New York with Reverend Everett Parker, who was the Director of the Office of Communications of the United Church of Christ. The Office was an advocacy arm of the church, whose members’ commitment to civil rights dated back to colonial times. The civil rights leaders sought the Office’s assistance because of their concern about the biased coverage of the civil rights movement by Southern television stations. After years of litigation, the meeting led to two decisions in the D.C. Circuit (United Church of Christ I & United Church of Christ II) that blocked efforts by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to relicense WLBT, a Jacksonville, Mississippi television station, which had …
On October 20, 1994, rising floodwaters from the San Jacinto River in Houston, Texas, caused a pipeline to break open, allowing gasoline to gush out and the river to catch fire. Such flooding is increasingly likely as the effects of climate change take hold, and yet, in the quarter century since that disaster, the federal government has implemented no new regulations to ensure that oil and gas operators are adequately preparing for the risks from more frequent and intense floods caused by the climate crisis.
In April 2019, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration issued an unenforceable notice reminding pipeline operators that severe flooding still threatens the integrity of their infrastructure. Similarly, prompted by chemical disasters during recent hurricanes, the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) alerted industrial facilities of the potential chemical disasters that could be …
In July, the Maryland Department of Environment (MDE) released the findings of a new ambient air quality monitoring project focused on the state’s Lower Eastern Shore. This effort was announced more than a year ago as a partnership between the Delmarva Poultry Industry (DPI), a trade group for just what it sounds like, and MDE to monitor ammonia and particulate matter emissions from industrial poultry operations.
The number of registered poultry CAFOs, or concentrated animal feeding operations, in Maryland has increased from seven in 2009 to 544 today, and the vast majority are located on the state’s Lower Eastern Shore. For years, residents have complained of foul odors emanating from nearby CAFOs, in addition to nausea, eye and throat irritation, and respiratory ailments. These symptoms are consistent with exposure to high levels of ammonia — a compound emitted when chicken litter breaks down, making it a …
Yesterday, I joined a group of CPR Member Scholars and staff in submitting comments on the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) "benefits-busting" proposal, which would drastically overhaul how the agency performs cost-benefit analysis on its biggest Clean Air Act rules. As we explain in our comments, the action is a thinly veiled effort to rig the results of those analyses – more so than they already are – to make it harder to issue appropriately strong safeguards, thereby sabotaging the effective and timely implementation of the Clean Air Act.
Our comments lay out in detail several shortcomings of the benefits-busting proposal. To begin, the EPA lacks legal authority to issue a binding rule of this kind. But even if the agency did have such authority, the proposal would do little, if anything, to improve its regulatory decision-making given that cost-benefit analysis is either superfluous to or even prohibited by the …
The nation is finally beginning to grapple with the widespread disparities in public health, economic opportunity, and community well-being across race and class that stem from longstanding systems of oppression and injustice. As systems thinkers, CPR's Board, staff, and Member Scholars have devoted considerable time to researching and understanding the roots of these inequities, considering the disproportionate impacts on frontline communities, and advocating for just policy reform.
Our Regulation as Social Justice project is an example. It recognizes that EPA, OSHA, and other "protector agencies" have a vital role to play in preventing harm to people and the environment through their statutory authority to adopt and enforce regulations. As they exercise that authority, agencies also have the capacity, indeed the moral obligation, to redress environmental and public health injustices by prioritizing the needs of overburdened communities in the development of their regulatory agenda and enforcement policies.
In …
