Get Energy Smart! NOW!

Industry lobbyists have unlimited access to the White House to gut health, safety and environmental regulations proposed by the EPA and other regulatory agencies. A secretive, little known part of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, called the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), now run by economist Cass Sunstein, has consistently backed industry lobbyists over EPA’s environmental experts. The most notorious case was when the Obama administration, under political pressure from polluting industries, blocked the new stricter ozone (smog) standards that were developed based on solid scientific evidence to meet the Clean Air Act, humiliating Lisa Jackson, the head of the EPA, who had strongly supported the new standards.

Report highlights Obama’s broken environmental promises.  Critics say White House office operates as ‘one-stop wrecking machine’ for important environmental protections.

When lobbying Congress and the president fails to delay or weaken a regulation, industry has learned over the years that Oira can be their last best resort, the report says.”A steady stream of industry lobbyists — appearing some 3,760 times over the ten-year period we studied — uses OIRA as a court of last resort when they fail to convince experts at agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to weaken pending regulations.”

The lobbyists were particularly obsessed with trying to undo environmental protections. Corporate executives and indusry lobbyists turned up at the White House about once a week over the last decade to try to delay or weaken EPA regulations, or more than 440 meetings.

Since it came to be in 1980 Ronald Reagan, George Bush I used OIRA, to slow, weaken or stop the implementation of EPA’s regulations. Bill Clinton reduced OIRA’s power, increased transparency and cut the number of regulations it reviewed, but George W Bush II gave OIRA more power than ever and eliminated transparency. Under President Obama, Cass Sunstein has continued to run OIRA like the Bush administration did. The generalist economists in OIRA lack expertise in the health, safety and environmental sciences disciplines necessary to write and review the regulations competently. A detailed report by the Center for Progressive Reform (PDF 92p.) shows that OIRA tends to back industry lobbyists over the government experts, accepting industry calculations of costs, no matter how outrageous they are.

Records show that EPA regulations have been disproportionately targeted by corporate lobbyists compared to the regulations of other agencies.

Our results tell a damning story of the relentless erosion of expert agency judgments by relatively junior White House staffers. OIRA economists use the window dressing of ostensibly objective cost-benefit analyses to camouflage politicized interventions that alter two-thirds of all regulatory drafts submitted by agencies other than EPA, and a shocking 84 percent of EPA submissions.

Tucked in a corner of the Old Executive Office Building, an obscure group of some three dozen economists exerts extraordinary power over federal rules intended to protect public health, worker and consumer safety, and the environment. Known officially as the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA, pronounced oh-EYE-ra), this unit reports to the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), but operates as a free-ranging squad that pulls an astounding number of draft regulatory actions — some 6,194 over the ten-year period covered in this report — into a dragnet that operates behind closed doors. No policy that might distress influential industries, from oil production to coal mining to petrochemical manufacturing, goes into effect without OIRA’s approval. A steady stream of industry lobbyists — appearing some 3,760 times over the ten-year period we studied — uses OIRA as a court of last resort when they fail to convince experts at agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to weaken pending regulations.OIRA keeps secret the substance of the changes it makes to 84 percent of EPA and 65 percent of other agencies’ submissions. Despite this effort to obscure the impact of its work, every single study of its performance, including this one, shows that OIRA serves as a one-way ratchet, eroding the protections that agency specialists have decided are necessary under detailed statutory mandates, following years — even decades — of work. OIRA review is tacked on at the end of rulemakings that involve careful review of the authorizing statutes, lengthy field investigation, extended advice from scientific advisory panels, numerous meetings with affected stakeholders, days of public hearings, voluminous public comments, and thousands of hours of staff work. When all else fails, regulated industries make a bee-line for OIRA’s back  door.

OIRA has functioned the same way under President Obama as it did under President Bush. Cass Sunstein has allowed corporate lobbyists to insert themselves throughout the process of regulatory development. The one large difference between administrations is that OIRA has exceeded time deadlines in 19% of all reviews involving meetings compared to 1% labeled “Deadline” under Bush

OIRA inserts itself at multiple stages in the regulatory process, giving industry lobbyists the opportunity to rewrite regulations as they are being drafted. Unlimited OIRA meetings with lobbyists can lead to long delays in regulatory review and development.

2% of EPA’s regulations reviewed in meetings were approved unchanged under Bush.

No regulations reviewed in meetings were approved unchanged on-time under Obama.

So we identified the ten EPA rules comprising the 19-percent “deadline” outcomes and searched through the online rulemaking docket for evidence of OIRA’s changes. For nine of them, EPA had posted redlined documents showing OIRA’s revisions, and in most cases, email correspondence between OIRA and EPA implying that changes were made. In seven of these, OIRA had made what seem like extensive changes to the rule—typically both the preamble and the text of the regulation itself.139 In the other two, OIRA appears to have changed, at the least, the impact assessments that accompany the agency’s rule.140 Without a clear summary of the changes made, we could not ascertain how substantive or significant these changes were. But given that OIRA uses the label “consistent with change” when even clerical corrections were made, we find it misleading that so many of these rules were simply labeled “deadline.”