Cases of Quayle Council Interference In the two years Vice President Dan Quayle chaired the Council on Competitiveness, the Council interfered in, stalled, or killed dozens of regulatory programs and issued sweeping policy reports with both legislative and regulatory proposals on issues such as biotechnology and product liability. Some examples:

1. The Quayle Council paved the way for interference by the White House in an important Clean Air Act rule that would allow electric utilities to evade pollution controls.
2. The Council worked to weaken a proposal to cut pollution over

President Bush's nominee to head OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), John Graham, has demonstrated consistent hostility to protections for public health, safety and the environment over his career. In particular, the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, which will hold a confirmation hearing on May 17, should consider the following areas of concern:

President Bush, yesterday (6/18), submitted to Congress his proposal for the creation of a new Homeland Security Department. The detailed 35-page bill would transfer about 100 federal entities into a single cabinet agency with an annual budget of more than $ 37 billion and about 170,000 employees -- reportedly the biggest government reshuffling since 1947. Yet buried within this bill (in Section 204) is a single sentence that could create the largest single loophole in the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), our safety net for right-to-know:

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