How much is a human life worth when it comes to a terrorist attack? Should the public be involved in setting the nation's safety priorities? The Bush administration is offering surprising answers to these questions and more as it develops the general framework for homeland security policy. The administration has aggressively used cost-benefit analysis, risk-based approaches, and market-style mechanisms to benefit corporate special interests by blocking effective regulation for public health, safety, and the environment. The rigid analytical tests that are the cornerstone of these approaches, however, are proving difficult to implement in the context of homeland security. According to BNA's Daily Report for Executives, John Graham, outgoing administrator of the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, told a gathering of former OIRA administrators at the industry-funded, conservative think tank AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies earlier this month that "a more practical and 'soft' test" than standard cost-benefit and risk assessment will apply to homeland security rules. Even if the White House's stringently anti-regulatory analytical policies do not apply to homeland security rules, the Bush administration is nonetheless making sure that corporate special interests will receive special favors in the regulatory process:

• For example, the Department of Homeland Security's draft National Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP), which "outlines the core processes and mechanisms DHS and its security partners will use to implement key protection initiatives" (2), insists that a hallmark of protective policy must be "cost effectiveness," meaning that homeland security policies should not be rigorous across-the-board standards but, instead, should contain "market systems," offer industry the option "to select the measure best suited to the particular need," and "[r]ely on self-assessments, where appropriate" (38-39).
• Industry compliance costs are so important in the NIPP that they are repeatedly mentioned as equivalent to government expenditures. One telling line repeated several times in the NIPP was parroted recently by Brigham A. McCown, deputy administrator of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), who told a Dangerous Goods Advisory Council conference that PHMSA "strive[s] to regulate in a way that maximizes the return and minimizes costs to the economy and the industries we regulate." According to BNA's Daily Report for Executives, McCown added that PHMSA is exploring ways to weaken the USA PATRIOT Act's requirement that companies conduct background checks for truck drivers transporting hazardous materials.
• Costs apparently can trump public health when it comes to determining safe levels of exposure to radiation in the wake of a nuclear or radiological terrorist attack. According to the New York Times, a leaked copy of upcoming DHS guidance for state and local governments advises that they "should take into account the cost of abandoning or cleaning up contaminated areas when deciding how much exposure to radiation is acceptable." Nuclear Regulatory Commission member Edward McGaffigan, Jr., who participated in drafting the guidance, added that developing strict protective standards "only aids and abets Al Qaeda or any other terrorists."
• Who gets to participate in decisions this important? The draft NIPP emphasizes the close cooperation of government and the corporate special interests that own and operate critical infrastructure, but the NIPP makes no mention of the participation of the public, including those who live in the communities at risk of suffering the consequences from an attack.

These weaknesses in the Bush administration's basic approach to homeland security policy reflect the prevailing trends in the administration's approach to public protections. Years after 9/11, there are still many unmet needs for protection in such basic infrastructure sectors as the water supply, the food supply, and facility security -- safety gaps that match, with discomforting regularity, the special interests that donated to the Bush/Cheney campaign coffers. Even the White House's recent about-face on chemical security was qualified: the administration reversed position from its insistence on voluntary self-regulation by the chemical industry, but it nonetheless expressed support only for risk-based regulation and "flexible" approaches instead of across-the-board requirements. By avoiding setting stringent safety requirements, the federal government is failing to create incentives for owners and operators of critical infrastructure to invest in research that could lead to innovative ways of doing business and achieving the requisite levels of safety. Contrary to the free-market fundamentalist arguments for market-style mechanisms in regulatory policy, the real driver of innovation in industry response is not market-style approaches but, instead, the stringency of the underlying standard. Moreover, calls for site-specific flexibility could mask efforts to set weak and unenforceable standards and could, by failing to create a level playing field through an even-handed, across-the-board standard, disadvantage firms that desire to achieve the highest level of safety possible.