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 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently announced that it was withdrawing a proposed rule that would have required Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) to report basic information to the agency. CAFOs are livestock facilities or farms that confine large numbers of animals and do not grow crops on the land. The concentrated waste from these operations can contaminate groundwater supplies as it sinks into the earth. The rule in question would have required CAFO owners to provide information on operations that could result in water pollution. By dropping the rule, EPA appears to have succumbed to pressure from the agricultural community to limit transparency and citizens' rights to a healthy water supply.
Has the Obama administration unleashed a regulatory "tsunami" as House and Senate Republicans charge? Has this administration issued more significant final rules than past administrations? Contrary to the rhetoric of the business community and its allies on Capitol Hill, hard research shows the answer is an unambiguous no.
Just before they left town for the July 4th break, members of Congress finally voted to prevent a doubling of student loan interest rates for one year with mere hours to spare. Unfortunately, they paid for it by reducing other educational programs. If we want an educated workforce in the future, we need more permanent fixes to make college affordable for Americans.
By refusing to hearAmerican Tradition Partnership v. Bullock, the Montana case on corporate election spending, the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed on June 25 that corporations can spend unlimited money to influence the outcome of political campaigns.
On June 26, a federal appeals court upheld the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act (CAA). The decision reaffirms the EPA's ability to protect our health and the environment from air pollution and allows it to continue combating climate change.
Transparency isn't typically the first thing that comes to mind about the 2010 health care law. However, the law puts more health care information in the hands of consumers and gives the public new tools for combating waste and fraud.
The Right to Know, the Responsibility to Protect examines the actions being taken or considered by state governments to ensure that the public can track the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing (also known as natural gas fracking). By examining current state disclosure laws, identifying the gap between effective disclosure policy and existing practice, and reviewing the most recent evidence on the health risks of exposure to the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing, we hope this report will encourage state and local authorities to improve their chemical disclosure standards.
For more than a decade, the mining industry has been waging a war to cast doubt on scientific studies showing that diesel exhaust causes lung cancer. Industry lost that fight on June 12 when the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) voted unanimously to designate diesel exhaust as a known cause of lung cancer. IARC’s conclusion comes more than a decade after the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) adopted a standard that reduced miners' exposure to diesel particulate matter – a prudent move on MSHA's part in the face of industry criticism.
On June 19, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued a policy that establishes a public online database of credit card complaints from customers. The database allows consumers shopping for a credit card to view data about other customers' experiences in order to avoid abusive practices and poor customer service.
