Just like last week, the Bush administration is unveiling regulations on Friday hoping no one (other than industry lobbyists) will notice. The Environmental Protection Agency today announced two final regulations, or, more precisely, deregulations: one to allow companies to burn tons of hazardous waste and another to exempt factory farms from reporting the air pollution generated by animal waste. According to the environmental group Earthjustice, the hazardous waste rule "exempts hazardous wastes burned for fuel from the strict oversight that generally applies to the storage, transport and burning of hazardous waste." The Bush administration pushed this rule through at the behest of industry lobbyists, Earthjustice says: "Industry trade associations, including the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Chemistry Council, requested this rollback." More from an Earthjustice statement: The agency justified the new rule by claiming that emissions from burning waste are not "likely" to differ from emissions from burning fossil fuels. But EPA offered no data to support that claim in their proposed rule, and admitted that some emissions could be higher. But EPA wasn't done with its Friday to-do list. Following the hazardous waste rule, EPA announced it had finalized another controversial rule which will exempt farms from reporting to the federal government the potentially dangerous emissions that rise from the waste of farm animals. Like the hazardous waste rule, industry lobbyists pushed for the air pollution reporting exemption. While the rule was under review at the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), EPA and OMB met with lobbyists from the National Chicken Council, the National Pork Producers Council, the National Milk Producers Federation, the United Egg Producers, and the National Turkey Federation. (To their credit, EPA and OMB also met with public health advocates in a separate meeting.) Keep in mind, this isn't an issue of controlling air pollution, just reporting it. EPA's rule violates the public's fundamental right to know. Is it really too much to ask that big farms inform the public of the pollution they are pumping into our air? Both rules are on Reg•Watch's list of midnight regulations and both are likely to be not only final but in effect by the time President Bush leaves office Jan. 20, 2009. That will make it much more difficult for the Obama administration to impact the rules.