Citizen Health & Safety

Wetlands Disappearing? Depends on What You Call a Wetland.

Mar 31, 2006 by Guest Blogger

The NYTimes reports that the record increase in national wetlands recently lauded by Interior Secretary Gale Norton and Agriculture Secretary Mike Joahnns is based on a very liberal definition of wetlands that includes manmade ponds and lakes.

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Questioning QALYs and CEA

Mar 27, 2006 by Guest Blogger

Merrill Goozner of CSPI has a blog with an entry helpfully going through Quality Adjusted Life Years: Medical economists conduct these cost-benefit studies to determine if a new drug, medical device or surgical procedure is worth its pricetag. But how do they determine benefits? Over the years, the profession has developed a tool for measuring medical value known as the quality adjusted life year, or QALY. One year of perfect health gets a score of one QALY. If a patient is bedridden and in constant pain for that entire year, it might be considered a .3 (three-tenths of a year) QALY.

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Another Way of Looking at Public Protections

Mar 24, 2006 by Guest Blogger

From the latest issue of Rachel's Democracy & Health News: What is government for? It is to protect the commons, all the things we own together and none of us owns individually, such as air, water, wildlife, the human gene pool, the accumulated human knowledge that we each inherit at birth, and more. Can protecting the commons be expressed in a simple set of guidelines? Here's a start... Read Carolyn Raffensperger, Ten Tenets: The Law of the Commons of the Natural World, Rachel's Democracy & Health News, No. 847, Mar. 23, 2006

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Climate Change, Whistleblowers, and Politicizing Science

Mar 20, 2006 by Guest Blogger

If you missed it last night (what, you were watching basketball?), 60 Minutes had a segment on the Bush administration's tendency to rewrite the science of climate change. Here's a brief look: What James Hansen believes is that global warming is accelerating. He points to the melting arctic and to Antarctica, where new data show massive losses of ice to the sea. . . . . "The natural changes, the speed of the natural changes is now dwarfed by the changes that humans are making to the atmosphere and to the surface."

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Court Rejects Data Quality Act Case Brought by Industry

A recent appeals court decision has dealt a blow to what many consider frivolous challenges to sound science made under the Data Quality Act (DQA). On March 6, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit dismissed a lawsuit brought by the Salt Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce under DQA, when judges found that the act does not allow for judicial review and that the plaintiffs had not show injury and thus lacked standing.

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House Bill to Roll Back Food Safety

The "National Uniformity for Food Act" (H.R. 4167) that would preempt nearly 200 food safety laws and affect state law in all 50 states, passed out of the House on March 8, to ire of consumer advocates. The legislation was introduced by Reps. Mike Rogers (R-MI) and Ed Towns (D-NY).

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Hearing Highlights Confusion Caused by "Legalese" in Regulation

Writing regulations in a way that is clear and easy to understand will save the government, taxpayers and regulated communities time and money, according to witnesses testifying on Mar. 1 before the House Government Reform Committee's Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs.

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Testimony on Reauthorization of the Paperwork Reduction Act

Testimony of J. Robert Shull, Director of Regulatory Policy, before the Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs of the House Committee on Government Reform

on "The Paperwork Reduction Act at 25: Opportunities to Strengthen and Improve the Law"

Mar. 8, 2006

Read the press release

Download the prepared statement and appendix.Testimony of J. Robert Shull, Director of Regulatory Policy, before the Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs of the House Committee on Government Reform

on "The Paperwork Reduction Act at 25: Opportunities to Strengthen and Improve the Law"

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First Official Congressional Forum for TRI

A briefing for House congressional staff held on Feb. 23 to inform Congress about the dangers of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposals to reduce Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) chemical reporting was the first official forum of its kind. Staff from more than 30 offices heard from a diverse panel of experts on how the changes that EPA is proposing would undermine first responder readiness, harm worker safety, interfere with state programs and hinder cancer research. The briefing was sponsored by Reps. Stephen Lunch (D-MA), Frank Pallone (D-NJ), Luis Gutierrez (D-IL), and Hilda Solis (D-CA).

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More than Paperwork

Despite its name, the Paperwork Reduction Act concerns much more than paperwork: it is a comprehensive law for management of information resources. Find out more with this backgrounder and this at-a-glance summary of the major parts of the PRA.

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