Rolling Back the Regs

By Kari Lydersen, In These Times. Posted March 9, 2007.

Emissions limits on coal-fired power plants, endangered species protections that inhibit logging, and restrictions on chemicals in drinking water have all been thorns in the side of the Bush administration.

But an executive order released on Jan. 18 with little fanfare could give the White House-controlled Office of Management and Budget (OMB) much greater control over such agencies as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

With the new Democratic majority in Congress, the Bush administration has less power to pass laws that weaken environmental protections, worker safety, public health standards and the like. Critics fear the White House will now carry out its political agenda by dictating how federal agencies can interpret and enforce policies.

The order could have devastating consequences for environmental protections, says Howard Learner, executive director of the Chicago-based Environmental Law and Policy Center.

"The Bush administration is now trying to do through administrative barriers and regulatory policies what it can't do through Congress," he says. "The administration has long been trying to change the Clean Air Act, forestry protections, and other environmental and natural resource statutes. The realignment of Congress clearly makes that more challenging. So they're turning to administrative processes that gum up the works."

(The OMB and the EPA did not respond to requests for interviews.)

A series of executive orders, the most recent being number 12866, have allowed the White House to review regulations before they are published in the Federal Register. The new order gives the OMB the expanded power to review "guidance documents" published by federal agencies.

Guidance documents are statements that explain how an existing regulation will be interpreted, implemented and enforced. In a worst-case scenario, the OMB review of guidance documents could take the nuts and bolts of interpretation and enforcement out of the hands of agency experts and turn it over to White House appointees with political agendas.

During a Feb. 13 House Science and Technology Committee hearing, Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.) said, "It is not good government when agency action is based on economic or political back room deals rather than environmental or public health consequences."

The bulletin defines "significant guidance documents" meriting OMB oversight as those that, among other things, would result in "an annual effect of $100 million or more or adversely affect ... a sector of the economy." In other words, environmental or other regulations that would cost industry considerable amounts of money -- like cleaning up archaic coal-fired plants -- would be subject to extra administrative oversight.

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Kari Lydersen writes for the Washington Post out of the Midwest bureau and just published a book, Out of the Sea and Into the Fire: Latin American-US Immigration in the Global Age.

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