How Anti-Regulation Is Obama’s New Regulatory Czar?
How Anti-Regulation Is Obama’s New Regulatory Czar?
Our guest blogger is Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch.
Cass Sunstein
How would progressives respond if President Bush nominated as “regulatory czar” a person who:
– Once called for changing the Clean Air Act to require a balancing of costs and benefits in setting national clean air standards – a fundamental weakening long sought by big polluters who believe it would help them resist cleanup;
– Urged the federal government to devalue senior citizens in calculating the benefits of federal regulations because “A program that saves young people produces more welfare than one that saves old people.” This is a concept dubbed the “senior death discount,” and that environmentalists forced EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman to renounce in 2003;
– Argued that it “might be better” to help future generations deal with global warming by “including approaches that make posterity richer and better able to adapt” than by “reducing emissions.”
– Even raised questions about the value of cleaning up Love Canal, reducing arsenic in drinking water and using child restraints in automobiles?
Progressives would’ve screamed, of course. But what will they do now that President-elect Obama appears poised to nominate Harvard Law School Professor Cass Sunstein to head the White House Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA)? For it’s actually Sunstein who has articulated the views noted above regarding clean air and the other issues involving costs, benefits and risk.
When President Bush nominated someone with similar anti-regulatory views, John Graham, to head OIRA, progressives and environmentalists strongly opposed his nomination.
Thirty-seven progressives, led by Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) and including Harry Reid (D-NV), unsuccessfully opposed the nomination of Graham, who was also opposed by the League of Conservation Voters because Graham “has a perspective on the use of risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis that would greatly jeopardize the future of regulatory policies meant to protect average Americans. He advocates an analytical framework that systematically reinforces the worst tendencies of cost-benefit analysis to understate benefits and overstate costs.”
LCV even deemed the vote on the Graham nomination one of the eight most critical environmental votes of 2001.
The OMB position is obscure to people outside the Beltway, but it wields enormous power. The office oversees regulations throughout the government, from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Draft rules must be approved by OIRA before promulgation. Under Bush, OIRA often used its power to reduce the size and scope of the safeguards to reduce compliance costs to companies causing the health or safety threat. And the Sunstein choice is raising some eyebrows among those wonks who closely scrutinize federal regulatory policy. Robert Shull, former director of regulatory policy at OMB Watch, told E&E News:
It’s difficult to square the choice of an anti-regulatory scholar for the chief regulatory officer with Obama’s many, many promises for a new direction and moving forward from eight years of anti-regulatory, deregulatory misbehavior.
It’s unfair, of course, to paint the 54-year-old Sunstein as a complete clone of Graham and the other Bush anti-regulatory zealots. Indeed, Sunstein has earned a reputation as a genuine progressive on some issues, arguing in 2004 for the implementation of a “Second Bill of Rights” promoted in January 1944 by Franklin D. Roosevelt, to guarantee the “right of every American to a job, a home, and medical care.”
But as co-chair of the American Enterprise Institute Center for Regulatory and Market Studies advisory board, Sunstein works for one of the nation’s most influential right-wing corporate anti-regulatory think tanks. In an interview last year with the Wall Street Journal, Sunstein said of Obama, “He’s a University of Chicago Democrat, so he’s very attuned to the virtue of free markets and the risks of free-market regulation. He’s not an old-style Democrat who’s excited about regulations for their own sake.”
Sunstein will likely be confirmed by the Senate. After all, he is a long-time friend of the President-elect from their faculty days at the University of Chicago law school. Even so, it would seem vital for senators to quiz Sunstein closely at upcoming confirmation hearings and meetings. Does he still hold those views on pollution and risk? (And could he become part of a White House faction — along with Larry Summers, incoming director of the National Economic Council, and incoming national security adviser James Jones — opposing aggressive action on global warming?)
He shouldn’t get a pass just because he was nominated by Obama.
16 Responses to “How Anti-Regulation Is Obama’s New Regulatory Czar?”
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Right wing corporate anti-regulatory think tank?
That helps explain The Carlyle Group’s David Marchick speaking on Obama’s revamping of the financial system:
http://peureport.blogspot.com/2009/01/another-prescient-carlyle-group-big-wig.html
January 10th, 2009 at 12:56 pmDoes C.A.P. recommend an alternative selection?
January 10th, 2009 at 1:58 pmIn answer to the rhetorical questions at the top, and on the evidence offered, the fact that unspecified progressives would have screamed reflects worse on them than the ascribed views do on Cass Sunstein. Is it really the case that the air should be cleaned ever more thoroughly, even if the marginal increases in cleanliness provide minimal or no benefits and cost a huge amount? If the level of arsenic in drinking water can’t be questioned, how do you ascertain what the right level is? And are there all that many grandparents who don’t consider risks to their grandchildren more urgent than risks to themselves?
January 10th, 2009 at 4:12 pmNot to say Sunstein’s right. There are limits to both the helpfulness and moral standing of cost-benefit analysis, and the value a grandparent puts on his or her life should not necessarily determine the value that the state gives it. There’s no doubt that it’s important for the senate to question Sunstein closely. But the aim of that questioning should not be simply to find out whether he still holds these views. It should be to understand why he holds them, how convincingly he defends them, and how he sees them impacting on policy.
Obama will appoint neocon Dennis Ross as his Special Adviser for the Middle East and Iran.
A Project for the New American Century member at the highest levels of American foreign policy?
Where’s that change I voted for?
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1054246.html
January 10th, 2009 at 4:39 pmFor more on Dennis Ross, neocon and his appointment as Special Adviser for the Middle East and Iran:
http://mideast.blogs.time.com/2008/12/23/obama-mideast-watch-ross-vs-kurtzer/
January 10th, 2009 at 5:07 pmThe I. Lewis Libby Legal Defense Trust has taken in more than $3 million from hundreds of donors, according to a person involved with the trust. The trust advisory board is populated primarily by prominent Republicans, including an antidrug activist and former ambassador to Italy, Mel Sembler; a former president of the Public Broadcasting Service, Richard Carlson, and a former Port Authority chairman, Lewis Eisenberg. The panel also includes a former Middle East negotiator under President Clinton, Dennis Ross.
http://www.nysun.com/national/all-star-game-taking-shape-in-libbys-trial/46741/
January 11th, 2009 at 2:56 pmOliver’s comment is correct. There should be no litmus tests, and some benefits bear no rational relationship to their costs. Regulation is often a blunt instrument and the more we can frankly discuss its costs and benefits the better. That said, many laws contain their own imbedded cost-benefit approaches; these will remain largely unaffected by broad policy biases one way or the other.
January 12th, 2009 at 12:47 pmProfessor Sunstein comes out of University of Chicago “Law and Economics” school, which is frequently seen as pro-business and a bit right-wing. However, the represents the progressive end of that school of thought, and might be a useful voice in the discussions. Ultimately, though, it’s Obama who makes the decisions; I trust his judgment enough not to need a “litmus test”.
January 12th, 2009 at 1:03 pmWelcome to the New Clinton Deal on Domestic and Foreign Policy. There will be little change until the power is broken and there is a conflagracious deliverance of redistributive wealth mechanisms.
January 12th, 2009 at 1:15 pmThe best article I read about Obama during the campaign was written by Cass Sunstein. If each of these men makes decisions based on this degree of intelligence and insight, I am not worried about where they will take us. http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/open_university/archive/2008/06/12/obama-the-university-of-chicago-democrat.aspx
January 12th, 2009 at 4:29 pmI think you are thinking like sukrat, but I think you should cover the other side of the topic in the post too…
January 13th, 2009 at 12:37 amI took Cass Sunstein’s environmental law course at the University of Chicago when I was there and this piece really is unfair. He’s great on environmental issues and focused on trying to come up with creative ways to get to desired results rather than the typical command and control mandates. I’ve been an ardent environmentalist in the 20 years since leaving U of C and consider Sunstein to be hugely influential in my thinking.
January 13th, 2009 at 1:24 amsmall government Republicans experienced a severe case of buyers remorse with Bush. Progressives already appear to be confronting the same problem with Obama. The rest of the country is slowly releasing its breath. We took a flyer, but it looks like maybe we will get a president that places the best interests of the country above ideology.
January 13th, 2009 at 4:27 amPersonal Opinion: From Obama’s speech looks like he will looking at global warming a lot more…
January 21st, 2009 at 5:24 amYou guys totally took Cass Sunstein out of context with that “welfare” quote. That was NOT an anti-welfare statement. Read the WHOLE paragraph/essay, on how he thought in 2003 that government should protect its citizens (using a cost-beneift analyssis based on something called “life-years” rather than just statistical life). I don’t totally get what it all means, but ThinkProgress should be held accountable for taking Sunstein statements out of context.
He’s a great guy – he even helped shoot down a Drudge-propelled lie last year (on the heels of his Joe The Plumber encounter) that Obama in 2001 spoke of civil rights leaders wanting to redistribute change and wealth through the courts system. Obama was against that – Drudge implied he was for it and Sunstein wrote that Obama’s position was the anti-liberal, even conservative one – civil rights leaders should have not been so “court-centered” and should have pushed for change through legislation, not lawsuits. That’s enough for now.
February 2nd, 2009 at 3:54 pmAnd, might I add was there was nothing wrong with Sunstein’s Abstract on how to tackle the problem of arsenic in drinking water either. He did not question the value of reducing arsenic in drinking water! You see, once you click on the links provided, the context makes the individual and highlighted quotes you cited look less questionable. Whatever happened to honest journalism?
February 2nd, 2009 at 4:21 pm