The OIRA report to Congress includes a list of what the White House touts as its “Regulatory Reform Accomplishments.” Far from being accomplishments, many of the actions on this list actually represent the gutting of important public safeguards or the release of watered-down protections. The following are a few examples: Reducing Listeria monocytogenes in Ready-to-Eat Meat and Poultry Products Though USDA might see the issuance of protections against Listeria, a deadly foodborne pathogen, as a major accomplishment, Consumer Federation of America has chronicled how the Bush administration reversed course from the Clinton administration and weakened efforts to protect the public from Listeria in order to serve its friends in the food industry. “Listeria poisoning results in the highest rate of hospitalization of any foodborne pathogen, and the second-highest fatality rate (i.e., twenty percent of Listeria victims die),” the report explains. “Moreover, this pathogen is particularly deadly to a fetus: a pregnant woman who contracts Listeria food-poisoning will almost always suffer miscarriage or stillbirth or bear a child with severe disabilities. The costs of acute illness from foodborne Listeria poisoning alone are estimated to be $ 2.3 billion per year.” The Clinton administration began the process of crafting a regulation to protect the public from Listeria: In the proposed rule, USDA said it intended to establish pathogen-reduction “performance standards” for all ready-to-eat products and, under some circumstances, require final-product testing for Listeria to ensure that the standards were being met. A performance standard generally limits the amount of a particular pathogen in the final product. The proposed rule spelled out in detail the Clinton Administration’s view that performance standards were vital to protecting the public from Listeria in processed meat and poultry products. Under the proposal, establishments producing ready-to-eat meat and poultry products also would have been required to test food-contact surfaces to verify that they are controlling Listeria within the entire processing environment. If an establishment found contamination on one of its food-contact surfaces, it would have to take corrective action to demonstrate that its product was not adulterated with Listeria. The government changed its position radically when George W. Bush was elected. The new administration position basically abandoned the idea of holding food industry companies to a clear performance standard, instead weakening the rule to give the food business more “flexibility” in Listeria controls and allowing the government less authority to enforce protections of the public. Why the radical change? To benefit the big food corporations like Pilgrim’s Pride, which supported the Bush/Cheney campaign and other GOP campaigns. The food industry’s own executives were appointed to key positions in the government agencies that are supposed to protect the public from the industry’s excesses, and those former executives may have had secret meetings with current executives: USDA’s top food-safety officials have chosen to conceal just how much access industry officials had to them during the formulation of the Listeria rule. They have refused to release the public calendars detailing their meetings held over the past four years with industry groups that were advocating a change in USDA’s approach to reducing illness from Listeria. By contrast, officials at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) – as well as at other agencies --publish their calendars on their agency’s website each week so that the public can be informed about who is seeking to influence policy. In fact, the decision to withhold public calendars is inconsistent with the practice of other USDA officials who have released their calendars in response to Freedom of Information Act requests. Get more information here. Safeguards Against Mad Cow Disease The centerpiece of the mad cow regulation is a so-called "zero tolerance policy" for the introduction into the food chain of certain cattle parts that are at highest risk of spreading bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). However, a report by the Center for Progressive Regulation, reveals that the zero tolerance policy actually allows the meat industry to opt out of a stringent hazard prevention approach and instead adopt less stringent industry-designed standards. Originally, the federal government regulated the contamination of the domestic meat supply through (1) a ban on imports from countries that had suffered BSE outbreaks, (2) a surveillance program that tested a small number of downer cattle, and (3) partial restrictions on feeding animal protein to cattle. With the discovery of a BSE cow in Washington state in December 2003, the USDA and FDA stepped up existing regulation and also initiated two new pieces of regulation designed to act as a firewall against the contamination of the human food supply. However, according to a report released on July 22 by the Center for Progressive Regulation, the new regulations act to quell public fears and protect the meat industry rather than actually prevent high-risk substances from entering the food supply. The primary example of loopholes in the new regulation regards preventing specified risk materials (SRMs) from entering the food supply. SRMs, which include brain, ganglia, and spinal cord tissue, are the animal parts most likely to contain the mad cow disease "prion" (a protein particle that lacks nucleic acid). According to then-Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman, preventing SRMs from entering the food supply is the best way to prevent the threat of BSE to humans. As she stated in a July 14 government reform subcommittee hearing, "When you remove the Specified Risk Materials from the food supply, as the chairman of the International Committee said to me, that is the most important thing that you do to protect public health." The new USDA regulation claims a zero tolerance policy on SRMs. However, as the CPR report uncovers, the regulation allows industry to choose one of two methods for meeting the requirements. Either companies an apply the existing standards of the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) system, a preventive approach to food borne hazards currently used to control the spread of contaminants such as salmonella and E.coli, or industry can use what is called a prerequisite program. This program option, favored by industry, allows companies to come up with their own standards for preventing SRMs from entering the food supply. The prerequisites program requires no oversight or approval from the USDA or FDA and provides no punitive measures for violations. Prerequisite programs are generally used for basic sanitation or other contaminations that are seen to be low risk. Companies are not required to release their prerequisite plans for SRMs, but the food safety department at the University of Nebraska has released standard operating procedures for the control of specified risk materials that best approximate the level of scrutiny required of a prerequisite program. According to the plan, "grossly identifiable spinal cord material spread by the splitting process will be trimmed from the carcass with a knife." The guidelines also require that the meat be inspected by "visual observation" once per day. In other words, the government’s “regulatory reform accomplishment” on mad cow endorses an eyeball test for materials that could pass mad cow disease into the food chain. With such imprecise guidelines, it seems likely that SRMs will continue to pass into Americans' food supply. Furthermore, these policies clearly do not meet the zero tolerance level mandated by the regulation. Read More. Hours of Service for Truck Drivers OIRA is giving itself a big pat on the back for helping to promulgate a regulation that was so atrocious that it was rejected by an appeals court and was only enacted through a rider to a spending-bill that stays the rejection of the regulation for one year. In a stinging rebuke, an appeals court rejected a change to regulations limiting the daily and weekly number of hours that truckers can work without rest breaks. Although the court based its decision on the agency's failure to consider a statutorily mandated factor, it also identified weaknesses in several arguments commonly raised to block regulation, repeatedly calling the arguments "troubling." The suit was brought by Public Citizen, which calls truck driving "one of America's most hazardous occupations." Public Citizen notes that almost 700 truckers die in crashes every year, and those crashes put all other drivers at risk. The rejected rule, which was issued in April 2003 by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, differed significantly from the version in the agency's Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPR) three years earlier:

• The final rule increased the maximum total daily driving from ten to eleven hours and dropped the NPR's requirement of a mandatory two-hour break during the day.
• The NPR, citing research about circadian rhythm cycles, would have required a 24-hour daily cycle. The explanation in the final rule admitted the 24-hour cycle would be "ideal from a scientific viewpoint" but stressed that an "inflexible" across-the-board requirement would unduly disrupt the trucking industry. The final rule mandated a 24-hour cycle only for drivers who took the maximum off-duty time (ten hours) and worked the maximum number of driving hours (fourteen). Those who maximized driving hours and minimized off-duty hours (ten hours), by contrast, were allowed to work on a 21-hour cycle.
• The NPR would have mandated a "weekend" of 32 to 56 hours, including two night-time periods, in order to prevent drivers from working five consecutive night shifts and to allow drivers to compensate for sleep deficits during "circadian-optimal times." The final rule mandated only a 34-hour "restart" phase, that would allow drivers to drive another seven- or eight-day work week after one 34-hour off-duty block. The restart provision would have actually increased the number of hours truckers could drive each week above the cap from the old existing rules. As the court noted, the old rules had set absolute caps of 60 hours for a seven-day week, or 70 hours for eight, whereas trucking companies could game the new rules and force truckers to work 77 hours in a seven-day period.
• The NPR would have reduced the "sleeper-berth exception" of the old rules. Under existing rules, drivers could break their required eight hours of consecutive rest into two separate periods totaling eight hours if they spent the rest period in the trucks' sleeper berths. The NPR would have closed this loop-hole for solo drivers but retained it, in modified form, for team drivers. The final rule rejected the NPR's closure of the sleeper-berth exception, calling the NPR's approach "inflexible" because the use of sleeper berths is "firmly entrenched in the practice, culture, and equipment of the trucking industry." FMCSA also argued that there was no evidence that the sleeper-berth exception posed a "safety hazard" and rejected existing studies as "inconclusive."
• The NPR would have required electronic on-board recorders to monitor compliance with the rule. The agency rejected EOBRs in the final rule, citing insufficient evidence of the costs and benefits of EOBRs.

Read more. Construction Runoff OIRA tossed out an EPA proposal to limit runoff from construction and development sites, the largest source of pollution in coastal waters and estuaries in the United States. EPA’s original submission to OIRA sought to require an 80 percent reduction in storm water discharges both during and after construction through commonly used measures, such as various drains, barriers, and buffer zones. Yet citing costs, OIRA cut out any reference to permanent controls put in place after construction – the main source of the problem – and blocked the performance standard for discharges during construction, a move strongly urged by developers, including the National Association of Home Builders. Instead, according to agency sources, OIRA forced EPA to present three weak options for public comment, one of which was to do nothing. Amazingly, this was the option EPA ultimately chose and that OIRA is touting as a regulatory accomplishment. Overtime Rules Far from being an achievement, the administration’s overhaul of overtime rules will disqualify millions of workers form overtime pay. Under the administration's new overtime rules, workers who earn less than $ 23,600 a year will become automatically eligible for overtime pay, which is a significant increase from the current threshold of $ 8,060, that was set in the 1970s. While this change appears to increase the number of workers receiving overtime pay, critics of the new regulations say this gain is offset by provisions within the bill that would end up exempting millions of administrative and white-collar workers from being able to collect overtime. As a Washington Post article states, the new overtime regulations would "make it easier for employers to reclassify their workers as 'executive,' 'administrative,' or 'professional' employees, who are not entitled to the overtime protections of the FLSA [Fair Labor Standards Act]." The new regulations could, as the Economic Policy Institute estimated, strip up to 6 million workers of their overtime rights. And more of these “accomplishments” await us all as the White House continues to advance its misguided hit list.