Report: White House bows to industry on enviro, safety rules

The White House office that oversees federal agency rulemakings — including environmental regulations — has routinely weakened rules and hears most often from industry groups, according to a new study by the liberal Center for Progressive Reform (CPR).

The group’s study, which tracks a decade’s worth of meetings between outside parties and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), alleges 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 is the agency within the White House Office of Management and Budget that reviews federal rules before they are released and is empowered to demand changes to the plans.

It routinely meets with representatives from trade groups such as the American Petroleum Institute and the American Chemistry Council, and green groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club.

But the report finds that over the last decade, 65 percent of the thousands of participants in meetings between OIRA and other parties represented regulated industries, which is five times the amount representing public interest groups.

From the report:

President Obama’s OIRA did somewhat better than President Bush’s in this regard, with a 62-percent industry participation rate to Bush’s 68 percent, and a 16-percent public interest group participation level to Bush’s 10 percent. Nevertheless, even under this ostensibly transformative President, who pledged to rid his administration of the undue influence of well-heeled lobbyists and conduct government in the open, industry visits outnumbered public interest visits by a ratio of almost four to one.

The report finds that OIRA is especially interested in EPA regulations, noting that over 40 percent of the over 1,000 meetings tracked were about EPA rules.

The report also notes that OIRA changed three-quarters of the federal agency rules submitted for review under President Obama, compared to a 64 percent change rate under President Bush.

Overall, EPA rules were the most frequently altered during the decade that the group reviewed, and the report finds that rules that were the subject of meetings with outside parties were a third more likely to be changed (the report also notes the difference has not been as “severe” under Obama).

While it’s not possible to chalk up specific changes to regulations to specific meetings, CPR sees a trend:

In light of previous studies suggesting that OIRA’s changes exclusively weaken agency rules, as well as a number of well-known examples where OIRA altered rules in exactly the ways requested by industry lobbyists, this evidence of OIRA’s frequent changes cements its reputation as an aggressive one-way ratchet.

Click here for the whole thing.