Political Interference

Feb 8, 2016

Top 400 Taxpayers See Tax Rates Rise, But There’s More to the Story

As Americans were gathering party supplies to greet the New Year, the Internal Revenue Service released their annual report of cumulative tax data reported on the 400 tax r...

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Feb 4, 2016

Chlorine Bleach Plants Needlessly Endanger 63 Million Americans

Chlorine bleach plants across the U.S. put millions of Americans in danger of a chlorine gas release, a substance so toxic it has been used as a chemical weapon. Greenpeace’s new repo...

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Jan 25, 2016

U.S. Industrial Facilities Reported Fewer Toxic Releases in 2014

The Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) data for 2014 is now available. The good news: total toxic releases by reporting facilities decreased by nearly six percent from 2013 levels. Howe...

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Jan 22, 2016

Methane Causes Climate Change. Here's How the President Plans to Cut Emissions by 40-45 Percent.

UPDATE (Jan. 22, 2016): Today, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) released its proposed rule to reduce methane emissions...

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more news

Groups oppose Cox as SEC chair

Jul 26, 2005 by Guest Blogger

The anti-investor record of Rep. Christopher Cox, President George W. Bush's nominee as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should disqualify him from leading the agency, according to a new report by Public Citizen.

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Administration Withholds Rationales Behind Anti-Regulatory Hit List

The Bush administration is refusing to inform the public about the justifications for deciding which regulatory protections were added to its hit list of safeguards to be weakened or eliminated.

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Harvard Doctor Hides Cancer Risk of Fluoride

Jul 14, 2005 by Guest Blogger

According to the Washington Post, a doctor at Harvard may have buried results showing that fluoride may increase the risk of a rare form of bone cancer—osteosarcoma--in adolescent boys. From WaPo:

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Cheap gas, anyone?

Jul 12, 2005 by Guest Blogger

The Department of Energy released its new outlook for fuel prices, and they again project that gasoline prices will remain in the neighborhood of $2.25/gallon. So file this under "wishful thinking": OMB's recent report on the costs and benefits of regulations uses a lowball figure of $1.10-$1.30, possibly to minimize the benefits from improvements to fuel economy regulations. See OMB Watch's comments on OMB's report for more information.

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White House Demands Power to Restructure Government

The White House finally released last week its proposal for legislation granting the Bush administration wide-ranging powers to restructure government programs and force them to plead for their lives every 10 years.

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Foxes in the henhouse: BLM drilling permits

Jul 11, 2005 by Guest Blogger

"Consultants paid by the oil and gas industry have been volunteering to work for the Bureau of Land Management's Vernal[, Utah] office for the past five months, expediting environmental studies to keep pace with a glut of drilling requests in the region," reports the Salt Lake Tribune. Five consultants paid by the Independent Petroleum Association of Mountain States have volunteered to work through "a backlog of about 400 permits." The Vernal BLM office receives the second-highest number of drilling applications in the country.

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Hearing on Hit List Addresses Larger Regulatory Policy Issues

A House subcommittee hearing on the White House's anti-regulatory hit list became a venue for stakeholders to voice their positions on the broader ongoing debate over public protections and political interference in regulatory policy, pitting corporate-conservative talking points against evidence of the need for stringent safeguards.

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Comments on 2005 Draft Regulatory Accounting Report

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Recently in the news

Jul 10, 2005 by Guest Blogger

Check out some of the latest news articles of interest to regulatory policy: Assault on Science:

Chris Mooney, "Some Like It Hot," Mother Jones, May-June 2005 Forty public policy groups have this in common: They seek to undermine the scientific consensus that humans are causing the earth to overheat. And they all get money from ExxonMobil.
Bill McKibben, "Climate of Denial," id. One morning in Kyoto, we won a round in the battle against global warming. Then special interests and pseudoscience snatched the truth away. What happened?

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The Going-Out-of-Business Myth

Again and again, when new regulatory protections have been proposed, corporate lobbyists have argued that business would be bankrupted and forced to go out of business. Again and again, they have been proven wrong. Check out this fact sheet showing examples of cases when compliance cost estimates turned out to be overstated.

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