An Unsafe America

   I touched on this topic a bit yesterday, but here is an article from American Progress with even more on the White House's power grab and the consequences for America's citizens.

by Faiz Shakir, Nico Pitney,
Amanda Terkel, and Payson Schwin

ADMINISTRATION
An Unsafe America

Since day one, the Bush White House has attempted to tighten its grip on executive agencies in an effort to assert business interests over the public welfare. The consequences for American workers have often been tragic, with unsafe workplaces and an unclean environment. On Jan. 18, President Bush took another giant step away from the best interests of the American public by quietly issuing amendments to Executive Order 12866. These directives will "give the White House much greater control over the rules and policy statements that the government develops to protect public health, safety, the environment, civil rights and privacy." Columbia Law School professor Peter L. Strauss said the executive order "achieves a major increase in White House control over domestic government. ... Having lost control of Congress, the president is doing what he can to increase his control of the executive branch."
CENTRALIZING EXECUTIVE POWER: President Bush's Jan. 18 directive attempts to further increase the power of OMB over federal agencies. Agencies develop rules -- regulating everything from clean water to hazardous workplaces -- "under authority granted to them in laws enacted by Congress. In many cases, the statute does not say precisely what agencies should do, giving them considerable latitude in interpreting the law and developing regulations." The new rules take power from expert civil servants and put it in the hands of political appointees. Each agency is now required to have a presidentially-appointed Regulatory Policy Officer responsible for supervising and approving new agency rules, as well as making "sure the agencies carry out the president's priorities." Additionally, in the past, each agency developed rules after identifying threats to public health and safety. The new Bush administration rules will require each agency to identify a "market failure" before issuing regulations, which OMB Watch notes "decidedly favors the regulated community and places yet another hurdle for agencies to issue regulations in pursuit of protecting the public."
ATTACKING AMERICANS' HEALTH AND SAFETY: While Bush's directives will apply to all federal agencies, "business executives and consumer advocates said the administration was particularly concerned about rules and guidance issued by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration." Wesley P. Warren of the Natural Resources Defense Council said, "The executive order is a backdoor attempt to prevent E.P.A. from being able to enforce environmental safeguards that keep cancer-causing chemicals and other pollutants out of the air and water." Throughout its administration, the Bush administration has meddled into the work of the EPA and OSHA, preventing them from protecting public safety. Last year, a federal judge sharply criticized EPA "for pursuing industry-friendly regulations at the same time it missed statutory deadlines to control toxic air pollution from small industrial plants." The Washington Post noted that in the first three and a half years of the Bush administration, OSHA -- "the branch of the Labor Department in charge of workers' well-being" -- eliminated "nearly five times as many pending standards" as it completed. In his first year in office, Bush tried "to eliminate nearly 100 of the agency's 2,400 jobs. ... Lawmakers restored the money and the positions. The next year, the administration succeeded in eliminating 10 jobs out of 95 in the standards area." The Center for American Progress has more on Bush's record here.
DOWNHILL ON DAY ONE: The Bush administration made weakening public safety a priority from day one. On the day Bush was sworn in, then Chief of Staff Andrew Card "issued a memo that, in an unprecedented move, put a two-month freeze on final rules across the government that had not yet gone into effect." A few months later, John Graham, then the White House's top regulatory official, "was alerting agencies that they would face closer scrutiny from the OMB when they proposed new rules. The day after he was confirmed by the Senate, he sent the first of 14 letters to agencies saying they had failed to prove the need for regulations they had proposed. That was more than had been sent during Clinton's eight years." Sally Katzen, who oversaw federal regulation for five years under President Clinton, said "new regulations were, in those days, embraced as a means to improve the quality of water, of air -- in short, of people's lives." In contrast, Graham called regulations "a form of unfunded mandate that the federal government imposes on the private sector or on state or local governments."
DEADLY CONSEQUENCES: Bush's executive order is more than just an insider bureaucratic maneuver. It has real -- and potentially deadly -- consequences for all Americans. Regulations protect Americans' everyday lives. In 2001, Bush put the interests of businesses over the interests of American workers and repealed "Clinton administration regulations that set new workplace ergonomic rules to combat repetitive stress injuries." Bush justified his move by stating that the benefits of the ergonomic rules had "uncertain benefits," but would have "cost both large and small employers billions of dollars and presented employers with overwhelming compliance challenges." OSHA estimated that the overturned rules would "would have generated benefits of $9.1 billion a year for each of its first 10 years, and would have prevented 460,000 musculoskelatal disorders a year." Last year, the Sago mine explosion, which killed 12 men, shook the nation. Mining deaths reached a 10-year high in 2006, calling attention to the Bush administration's neglect of safety regulations. A report by the AFL-CIO noted that the administration cut 170 positions from the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration and had not proposed a single new mine-safety standard or rule during its tenure. For his 2000 presidential bid, Bush received $275,000 from West Virginia coal firms.
AN ANTI-REGULATORY ZEALOT: Bush's newest executive order bears the fingerprints of Susan Dudley, senior advisor to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). The OIRA is an obscure, but "super-powerful office that oversees many business regulations." The conservative 109th Congress blocked her nomination. Bush appointed Dudley as senior advisor one day after he renominated her, which OMB Watch notes is "a slap in the face to bipartisanship" because it allows her to serve in a position similar to the post for which she was nominated, but without congressional approval. In a primer on regulation written in 2005, "while she was at the Mercatus Center of George Mason University in Northern Virginia, Ms. Dudley said that government regulation was generally not warranted 'in the absence of a significant market failure.'" Also, while she was at the industry-backed Mercatus, Dudley opposed regulating airbags in cars (preferring to leave public safety decisions "to the marketplace"), arsenic in drinking water (claming that there "is a wide range of uncertainty in the science surrounding the health effects of arsenic in U.S. drinking water supplies"), and health standards for protecting the public from smog. Write to your lawmakers and tell them to oppose Dudley's nomination.

                                     IMPEACH! INDICT! IMPRISON!

 

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