The BP Oil Spill: Hollow Regulation Meets Hobbled Law
This coming April 20 will mark the one-year anniversary of the first day of the BP Oil Spill – a three-month polluta-polluza that eventually became the largest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the world. That was the night that a long series of failures finally came to a head: failures aboard the Deepwater Horizon by BP and its contractors, failures in the enforcement of regulations intended to prevent such disasters or at least limit the damage from them, failures in the crafting of the regulations governing the process by which BP won approval to drill, and failures in the drafting of the legislation from which flowed the regulations.
For the 126 workers on the Deepwater Horizon that night, the sounds and images of those failures must have been terrifying beyond imagining. Eleven of them didn’t make it home alive, and another 17 were severely injured. The rest escaped in lifeboats or by jumping into oily seawater while a fire raged overhead. Nearly three months later, after an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil had spewed into the Gulf of Mexico, the damage spanned hundreds of miles of shoreline and thousands of square miles in the Gulf …
Having voted to repeal health care legislation, House Republicans have now taken aim at government regulations, describing efforts to protect people and the environment as “job-killing.” This claim conveniently papers over the fact that it was the lack of regulation of Wall Street that tanked the economy and caused the current downturn. But nonetheless, seeking rhetorical points to boost their anti-regulations campaign, House Republicans are trumpeting a recent report, done for the Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy. The report, authored by Nicole Crain and Mark Crain, claims that regulation cost the U.S. economy $1.75 trillion dollars in 2008. Upon examination, it turns out that the estimate is the result of secret calculations, an unreliable methodology and a presentation calculated to mislead.
Crain and Crain’s $1.75 trillion estimate is far larger than the estimate generated by the Office of Management and Budget …
Republican legislators have been scheming for years about ways that they can slow down, if not stop, needed health, safety and environmental regulations. But their latest effort, though creative, is perhaps their most ill-conceived. They’re calling it “The REINS Act” (in the last Congress, H.R. 3765 sponsored by Rep. Geoff Davis (R-KY), S. 3826 sponsored by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC)), and, if adopted, no new "economically significant" regulations would take effect unless affirmatively approved by Congress, by means of a joint congressional resolution of approval, signed by the President. The proposal is a genuinely radical departure, plainly designed to gum up the regulatory works. Republicans have promised to hold congressional hearings on the bill early this year.
The REINS Act would make Congress the final arbiter of all significant regulatory decisions. While superficially this may seem like a good idea – after all, Members of Congress …
A particularly revealing story in The Washington Post this weekend reported on a sordid tale of regulatory failure that may have helped contribute to this spring and summer’s outbreak of outbreak of egg-borne salmonella that sickened more than 1,900 people and led to the largest recall of eggs in U.S. history. In an agonizing case of closing the chicken coop door after the tainted eggs had escaped, FDA finally adopted a long-delayed regulation in July – two months after the outbreak – that might have helped prevent it. And this month Congress may give FDA new authority to regulate the safety of food in light of the salmonella case and other highly publicized outbreaks of food poisoning in the last few years.
Yet, under a proposal floated in an op-ed by Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) in the same newspaper two days later, regulators would be forced …
Cross-posted from the Huffington Post.
Eager to blame the state of the economy on the Administration, House Minority Leader John Boehner recently tried to argue that the Administration's regulatory agenda is standing in the way of recovery. Sadly for Boehner, he tried to make that case shortly before the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and while the smell of the BP oil spill still lingers in the Gulf. By any reasonable measure those two incidents are among the costliest and most devastating examples of the human and monetary costs of lax regulation.
In a letter to President Barack Obama, Boehner criticized the Administration's plans to implement 191 rules with potential economic costs greater than $100 million, arguing that "uncertainty" in the business community about the fate of the regulations is "contributing significantly to the ongoing difficulty our economy is facing." Apparently, Boehner and other opponents …
Cross-posted from ACSblog.
The Center for Progressive Reform (CPR) today released a white paper examining "plausibility pleading"-the Supreme Court's heightened pleading standard that plaintiffs must satisfy in order to bring their claims in federal court. The paper, Plausibility Pleading: Barring the Courthouse Door to Deserving Claimants, comes after the Court's decision one year ago this week in Ashcroft v. Iqbal that this standard applies to all types of federal cases. The Court first created this standard in Twombly v. Bell Atlantic, three years ago.
Iqbal and Twombly will lead to the dismissal of meritorious cases, thereby weakening the civil justice system and making it more difficult to hold businesses or the government accountable for wrongful actions. Increased dismissals will also deprive federal regulators of vital information needed for improving the regulations that protect people and the environment. Our paper therefore calls on Congress to …
The Workforce Protections Subcommittee of the House Education and Labor Committee held a hearing Tuesday on the Protecting America’s Workers Act of 2009, legislation that would, among other reforms, modernize workplace health and safety penalties. More than a decade ago, I testified at a similar hearing in the House of Representatives on the same subject. The need for stronger OSHA penalties was apparent then, and it is no less apparent today.
The hearing is memorable to me because I testified along with a father whose son was killed on a construction site while working at a summer job between years of college. His son was working on one of the floors of a multi-story building under construction. He was asked to carry some construction materials across the floor of the building from one side to the other. He piled up the materials in his arms with …
When my children were growing up, they loved the “Where’s Waldo” book series. Each page had an illustrated picture chock full of people and objects; hidden somewhere among the mass of detail was a small picture of a cartoon character named Waldo. When the Toyota Motor Corporation announced this week that it was stopping the production and sales of several of its car models because of a dangerous problem with unintended acceleration, we had a “Where’s Waldo” scenario. The National Highway Safety Administration (NHTSA), the regulator which is supposed to protect the American public from this sort of event, is nowhere to be seen, hidden inconspicuously in the background, hard to spot because of its disturbingly minor role in the unfolding events.
As I wrote earlier, Toyota had previously announced that it would replace the accelerator pedals on about 3.8 million vehicles in the …
As reported in a post Saturday, OMB has become the epicenter for industry efforts to head off an EPA regulation concerning coal ash. There have been 17 meetings between industry interests and OMB officials. When questioned about the large number of meetings, an OMB spokesman said, "This has been a very regular, very normal deliberative process on a very complex rule.” For progressives who had hoped that OMB in the Obama administration would not replicate OMB in the Bush administration, this is disappointing news.
Industry swarmed to OMB after EPA had submitted a draft rule on coal ash to OMB for its approval. Under a presidential order, agencies like EPA must submit significant new regulations, like the coal-ash rule, to the White House for review prior to the time that they are officially proposed. Unhappy that their efforts to persuade EPA to propose a different rule had …
The Concord Monitor has identified a New Hampshire factory (Franklin Non-Ferrous Foundry) that has been the subject of previous OSHA investigations and fines, yet continues to expose its workers to dangerous conditions. OSHA’s most recent fine, $250,000, came after the agency found that a worker had high levels of lead in his blood. The newspaper obtained OSHA documents that revealed a pattern of violations by the company. The New Hampshire case is a troubling reminder of how weak OSHA is -- and of how that weakness puts many workers at danger in this country today.
OSHA has cited the foundry for 57 violations over the last four years, including 25 “serious” violations, which means the violation has potential to kill or seriously harm an employee. The violations included exit doors that could not be opened from the inside without keys or tools. OSHA inspectors also found …
