How Bush Undermines Government Regulation

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from OurFuture.org:



How Bush Undermines Government Regulation
By Rick Melberth and Matt Madia
Submitted by OurFuture.org Staff
January 31st, 2008



The primary responsibility of federal agencies is to enforce federal law through regulation. While agency officials often have latitude in choosing a particular approach, they do not have the option of not regulating when Congress has mandated they do so.

Because of the scope and importance of agency decision making, it follows that presidents, in their role as chief executive, attempt to exert control over the decision process. A common way of doing that has been to impose broad, administration-wide measures to control how agencies interpret and enforce federal statutes. One of the most damaging of these prescriptive tactics has been the imposition of cost-benefit analysis.

Every president since Richard Nixon has required agencies to perform some kind of assessment of the costs and benefits of regulations before they are finalized. Under President George W. Bush, the White House Office of Management and Budget has expanded the role of cost-benefit analysis in regulatory decision-making and dictated to agencies exactly what they should assess and how they should assess it. These policies threaten to undermine each and every policy decision agencies make.

Detractors of regulation can use cost-benefit analysis to force decision makers to overemphasize economic impact. Executive branch officials often meddle with the economic assessments allowing critics to reinvent the debate over a policy and use economic scare tactics to demonize the policy among the public.

This dilemma has been plainly evident with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s current revision to the national ambient air quality standard, or NAAQS, for ozone.

The Clean Air Act directs EPA to make science the preeminent criterion at every stage of the NAAQS standard-setting process. In setting a standard, EPA is to consider only an air pollutant’s effect on public health and is prohibited from considering economic factors. Nonetheless, EPA had to prepare a detailed cost-benefit analysis in advance of its recent proposal to tighten the ozone standard. .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.ourfuture.org/progressive-opinion/how-bush-undermines-government-regulation