Regs Talk: The CSS Blog
Blogs are authored by CSS members and policy experts, and have been reprinted with permission.
Cementing Kavanaugh’s Legacy: How a Supreme Court Nominee Lied About a Cement Pollution Case
By Scott Faber, Environmental Working Group When Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he testified that he had ruled for the environment in “many” and a “large number” of cases. (You can watch his testimony here.) The truth is that as a judge on the federal Court of Appeals for […]
Top EPA Science Office Sidelined as Political Appointees Hatched Controversial Science Proposal
By Michael Halpern, Union of Concerned Scientists The EPA’s Office of the Science Advisor (OSA) was excluded from discussions around a proposal to restrict the types of science that could be used in agency decisions, according to an email obtained by UCS. Described by EPA as providing “leadership in cross-Agency science and science policy,” the OSA would normally be […]
Department of Education Will Miss the Deadline to Gut Borrower Protections This Year
By Julie Murray, Public Citizen In a filing last night, the Department of Education announced that it will miss a November 1 statutory deadline to publish a rule that rolls back protections for student loan borrowers and students defrauded by for-profit colleges. Those protections, part of what’s known as the Obama-era borrower defense rule, were set to […]
Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Exist
By Bartlett Naylor, Public Citizen As America takes stock of Wall Street 10 years after it crashed the economy, one glaring fact flashes red and demands reform: The megabanks remain too big. On Oct. 3, 2008, Congress approved the largest bailout in the history of any country. Politicians in Washington did so because financial policy […]
Facebook’s Breach Is News, But Congress’ Lack of Action on Data Security Is the Bigger Story
By Sean Davis Jr., National Consumers League Last week, Facebook announced that they suffered a data breach affecting a reported 50 million users. Coming just over a year to the date from an even larger data breach at Equifax, which affected 146 million consumers, we have to ask: Why is Congress continuing to dither on […]
DOI’s New Policy Restricts Science Under the Guise of Transparency
By Charise Johnson, Union of Concerned Scientists Last week, Interior Department Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt issued an order, “Promoting Open Science”, purportedly to increase transparency and public accessibility of the research used by the Department to make science-based decisions. This seems dubious coming from a person who spent much of his career lobbying for the oil and […]
The Trump Administration’s Acknowledgement of Climate Change Is Cynical — and Potentially Sinister
By Melissa Powers, Center for Progressive Reform As Juliet Eilperin, Brady Dennis, and Chris Mooney of The Washington Post reported on September 27, the Trump administration seems to finally be acknowledging that climate change is real. But the motivation for recognizing that reality is cynical, at best, so rather than proposing doing something – anything – about climate change, […]
The EPA Disbanded Its Office of Science Advisor. Here’s Why That Matters.
By Michael Halpern, Union of Concerned Scientists Late last week, the EPA announced its intention to get rid of its Office of the Science Advisor (OSA) and bury its functions deep down in another agency office. This move will significantly diminish efforts to coordinate and standardize the way that EPA does science. The administrator will […]
Customer Bills and Clean Energy at Stake in PJM Market
By Miles Farmer, Natural Resources Defense Council NRDC and the Sustainable FERC Project, together with a coalition of clean energy and consumer advocates, are pressing the nation’s grid regulator, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), to protect consumers from billions in extra charges, and respect states’ rights to advance clean energy. The groups submitted several different […]
Trump’s USDA vs. Science
By Ricardo Salvador, Union of Concerned Scientists The United States has a complicated history when it comes to science. The very birth of the nation is bound up with the European Scientific Revolution and Age of Enlightenment, culminating in the notion that reason should inform the self-government of free peoples. President Jefferson wrote that science “is more […]
Trump Administration’s Proposed MATS Rollback Is Direct Attack on Women and Children
By Sally Hardin, Osub Ahmed and Cristina Novoa, Center for American Progress This week, the Trump administration plans to take initial steps to allow power plants to spew toxic mercury and other hazardous pollution into the air, threatening the health of the American public. Like so many of the Trump administration’s rollbacks, this proposed change to undo the existing Mercury and Air Toxics […]
Scott Pruitt and Brett Kavanaugh Have Something in Common
By Scott Faber, Environmental Working Group Scott Pruitt and Brett Kavanaugh have something in common. It’s not just that they both believe that the Environmental Protection Agency lacks the power to regulate greenhouse gases. Or that the EPA lacks the power to regulate air pollution that starts in one state and ends in another. Or that EPA can ignore the “co-benefits” […]
Executive Order 12866 Is Basically Dead, and the Trump Administration Basically Killed It
By James Goodwin, Center for Progressive Reform Sunday marked the 25th anniversary of the issuance of Executive Order 12866, but it was hardly a happy occasion. For all intents and purposes, though, the order, which governs the process by which federal agencies develop regulations under the supervision of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory […]
Trump’s Dirty Power Plan Condemns Our Kids to Hell on Earth
By David Doniger, Natural Resources Defense Council The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed repealing the Clean Power Plan, the nation’s first limits on the nearly two billion tons of climate-changing carbon pollution coming from power plants each year, and replacing it with a Dirty Power Plan that will actually increase dangerous air pollution from coal-fired power plants. […]
Coal Ash Was a Disaster in North Carolina Well Before Hurricane Florence — And Now It’s Even Worse
By Mary Anne Hitt, Sierra Club As people in North and South Carolina continue to confront flooding and other massive damage from Hurricane Florence, it’s heartbreaking to watch them have to deal with yet another hazard: the toxic coal ash leaked from coal ash ponds and landfills in the region. Even more infuriating is the […]
With Headlines Elsewhere, Administration Offers Just ONE Day for Public Input on Major Climate Rule
By Julie McNamara, Union of Concerned Scientists On Monday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will hold its only public hearing on the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule, the Trump administration’s recently proposed Clean Power Plan (CPP) replacement. The CPP was a landmark rule, setting the nation’s first-ever carbon standards for power plants. This proposed replacement would severely curtail […]
Trump’s Carbon Rollbacks Mean Hell on Earth
By David Pettit, Natural Resources Defense Council Fresno, California, sits in a heavily-polluted area of California’s San Joaquin Valley and so was an appropriate site for the September 24, 2018 hearing about vehicle-related air pollution—except that the federal proposal in question would make air pollution worse, not better. The federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) […]
Showing Children’s Health the Door at EPA
By David Wallinga, Natural Resources Defense Council Yesterday, the Trump Administration’s EPA put the pediatrician who heads the Agency’s Office of Children’s Health Protection on administrative leave. Her forced exit raises serious questions about whether this EPA remains committed to protecting children from the threats posed, for example, by lead in drinking water, by brain toxic […]
Manufactured Homes Could Save Big. Why Haven’t They?
By Lauren Urbanek, Natural Resources Defense Council There may be some major changes afoot for the energy efficiency standards for manufactured homes, which house 20 million Americans, but it’s unclear whether they will actually save residents energy and money – and whether “alternative approaches” under consideration by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) would even […]
Ignored Benefits: Trump Nixing $2.1 Trillion in Benefits Via Regulatory Cuts
By Alan Zibel, Public Citizen President Trump often claims that cutting back on regulations will help the U.S. economy. But the Trump administration’s zeal for slashing “red tape” conceals an often-ignored reality: regulations provide massive benefits to consumers, workers and the economy. In fact, a new Public Citizen analysis [PDF] finds that the Trump administration wants to deprive Americans […]