The Center for Effective Government (formerly OMB Watch) ceased operations as of March 2016. The majority of work and materials has been passed on to the Project On Government Oversight (POGO). This site is being maintained as an archive of materials produced.
The White House Office of Management and Budget has approved the Environmental Protection Agency’s determination that greenhouse gas emissions threaten the public. (Thanks to Frank O’Donnell at Clean Air Watch for finding this earlier today; he surmises EPA could officially announce the so-called endangerment finding this week or on Earth Day, April 22.)
On April 9 I introduced the need for improving the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) and suggested three broad paths for achieving this. Here I discuss one path – expanding information. We always want more information. And for a while TRI was a program regularly searching for new data to report with new industries being added, new chemicals, lowering the threshold for some chemicals, and adding federal facilities. But recently we have gone backwards with an effort by the agency to raise the reporting thresholds and have fewer detailed reports filed.
Recently the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Environmental Council of the States (ECOS) invited me to speak at the National TRI Conference about my ideas for where the new administration might take the Toxic Releases Inventory (TRI) program. I thought some people who missed the conference might be interested in the ideas so I’m posting them here in a series of blog posts.
President Obama has yet to nominate leaders for many of the regulatory agencies responsible for protecting public health and safety, but two more of those agencies may soon have leaders.
The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled 6-3 that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can weigh costs against benefits under parts of the Clean Water Act. The court said EPA was not required to impose the most environmentally protective requirements on power plants that inadvertently kill millions of fish.
The latest salmonella scare, this one tied to contaminated pistachios from California, has, thankfully, not proven to be a major public health crisis like the months-old peanut scandal. But an examination of the facts can be just as frustrating.
A new Department of Labor report is highly critical of a Bush administration program designed to improve workplace safety. The report links poor enforcement to the deaths of workers at high-risk facilities – the specific targets of the special program. Poor quality data and inadequate training, inspections, and enforcement plagued the program.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has once again announced that it is behind schedule in creating a registry for the reporting of food safety problems, according to Congress Daily (via nextgov.com).
The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is permitted to weigh compliance costs against environmental benefits when writing certain rules under the Clean Water Act.
House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Henry Waxman (D-CA) and environmental subcommittee chair Edward Markey (D-MA) have drafted a bill that would establish a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gas emissions, mandate increases in the renewable energy supply, and require better energy efficiency in cars and other consumer products. The ultimate goal of the bill is to cut emissions 83 percent by 2050.
