Legislation Would Delay Important Safeguards and Limit Citizens' Access to Courts
Apr 23, 2013
Earlier this month, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA) introduced companion legislation in the House and Senate, entitled the Sunshine for Regulatory Decrees and Settlements Act (S. 714 and H.R. 1493). Disguised as an effort to increase transparency, this legislation aims to bog down the regulatory process with time-consuming and costly procedural hurdles that would limit the lawsuits brought to challenge unreasonable delays by regulatory agencies.
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Open Government Advocates Disappointed by Rollback of STOCK Act Requirements for Online Access
Apr 18, 2013
Just a year after enacting it, Congress and the president rolled back a key transparency provision of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act of 2012 (STOCK Act) instead of amending it to address concerns.
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The Small Business Administration's Office of Advocacy Exaggerates Its Influence
Mar 26, 2013
The Office of Advocacy, an independent office within the Small Business Administration (SBA), recently released its annual report to Congress on agency compliance with the Regulatory Flexibility Act (RFA) during fiscal year (FY) 2012. In the report, the office makes dubious claims that its efforts to delay or stop six agency rules saved billions for small businesses in the last fiscal year.
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Disclosure at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs: Written Comments and Telephone Records Suspiciously Absent
Feb 26, 2013
In 1981, President Reagan signed an executive order charging the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) with reviewing all economically significant rules and rejecting those that did not pass a strict cost-benefit test. Supporters of environmental, consumer, and worker protection standards have long criticized the office for failing to make its analyses public. Moreover, the office has a reputation for meeting with industry interests behind closed doors and for engaging in intrusive back-and-forth exchanges with agencies over proposed rules. This often results in the office delaying, watering down, or blocking new standards and safeguards.
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Anti-Regulatory Forces Target Agency Science to Undermine Health and Safety Standards
Feb 26, 2013
As committees of the 113th Congress begin to implement their agendas, it is increasingly apparent that environmental and health standards, and the science serving as the basis for these protections, will remain a favorite target of anti-regulatory legislators. Last session's industry-supported proposals to change scientific assessment programs would undermine environmental, health, and safety standards, yet they are likely to reappear. Meanwhile, new investigations underscore that these measures ignore the real impediments to improving the credibility and usefulness of agency science and risk assessments.
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Court Invalidates National Labor Relations Board Recess Appointments, Future of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Now Uncertain
Feb 7, 2013
On Jan. 25, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals invalidated three recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). President Obama made these appointments on Jan. 4, 2012, the same day he appointed Richard Cordray as Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a crucial agency designed to protect Americans from abuses by credit card companies and others in the financial industry.
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Small Businesses, Public Health, and Scientific Integrity
Jan 29, 2013
This report examines the activities of an independent office within the Small Business Administration: the Office of Advocacy. The Office of Advocacy has responsibility for ensuring that federal agencies evaluate the small business impacts of the rules they adopt. Scientific assessments are not “rules” and do not regulate small business, yet the Office of Advocacy decided to comment on technical, scientific assessments of the cancer risks of formaldehyde, styrene, and chromium. By its own admission, Advocacy lacks the scientific expertise to evaluate the merits of such assessments.
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Sponsors of the Independent Agency Regulatory Analysis Act Try to Slip Bill in Under the Radar
Sep 5, 2012
The Independent Agency Regulatory Analysis Act (S. 3468), introduced on Aug. 1 by Sens. Mark Warner (D-VA), Rob Portman (R-OH), and Susan Collins (R-ME), may appear to be just another item in the string of anti-regulatory legislation considered, but not enacted, by the 112th Congress. Unfortunately, because it boasts both Democratic and Republican co-sponsors, it appears to be heading straight to mark-up within the Senate's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC).
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Vote Imminent on House Bill that Would Shut Down Safeguards
Jul 24, 2012
The House will vote later this week on the misleadingly titled "Red Tape Reduction and Small Business Job Creation Act." The bill is a brazen attempt to shut down the system of public safeguards that protects our air, water, food, consumer products, and economy and would do nothing to create jobs.
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EPA Drops Rule to Require Basic Information on Agricultural Sources of Water Pollution
Jul 24, 2012
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently announced that it was withdrawing a proposed rule that would have required Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) to report basic information to the agency. CAFOs are livestock facilities or farms that confine large numbers of animals and do not grow crops on the land. The concentrated waste from these operations can contaminate groundwater supplies as it sinks into the earth. The rule in question would have required CAFO owners to provide information on operations that could result in water pollution. By dropping the rule, EPA appears to have succumbed to pressure from the agricultural community to limit transparency and citizens' rights to a healthy water supply.
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