Tuberculosis had sneaked up again, reappearing with alarming frequency across the United States. The government began writing rules to protect 5 million people whose jobs put them in special danger. Hospitals and homeless shelters, prisons and drug treatment centers – all would be required to test their employees for TB, hand out breathing masks and quarantine those with the disease. These steps, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration predicted, could prevent 25,000 infections a year and 135 deaths.
By the time President Bush moved into the White House, the tuberculosis rules, first envisioned in 1993, were nearly complete. But the new administration did nothing on the issue for the next three years.
Then, on the last day of 2003, in an action so obscure it was not mentioned in any major newspaper in the country, the administration canceled the rules. Voluntary measures, federal officials said, were effective enough to make regulation unnecessary.
The demise of the decade-old plan of defense against tuberculosis reflects the way OSHA has altered its regulatory mission to embrace a more business-friendly posture. In the past 3 1/2 years, OSHA, the branch of the Labor Department in charge of workers’ well-being, has eliminated nearly five times as many pending standards as it has completed. It has not started any major new health or safety rules, setting Bush apart from the previous three presidents, including Ronald Reagan .
The changes within OSHA since George W. Bush took office illustrate the way that this administration has used the regulatory process to redirect the course of government.
It does have to make you wonder just how effective charity groups will be who are dependant on the largess of corporate donors in dealing with health issues like these. And, along those lines, whether tax cuts for the rich or saving lives, given an impartial cost-benefit review, should really take priority in our national debate. Even more to the point - these decisions didn’t even get a debate. It was an administrative decision carried out in effective secrecy. I suspect that’s just the tip of the iceberg with this crew.
I apologize for the hyperbole - I’m not in the best of moods tonight. I read a story like this and I honestly do, for just about the first time, think “My god, this man really is a monster.” Are human lives just so incredibly meaningless to him that he can casually, and behind closed doors, in such a manner as to try and ensure no attention is paid to it, eradicate ten years of work designed to prevent a new epidemic from sweeping our nation, to prevent millions of at-risk people from being exposed to this disease? This kind of casual disregard for the life and well-being of people has just so seemed to characterize the regulatory behavior of this administration. It really seems despicable to me, almost numbingly so. Not just this one decision, but the net result of all of them, over the years of his presidency, and the way that he has carried them out in secrecy, under cover of a major event, or at midnight on the end of a news cycle, using any trick possible to keep them from public scrutiny and out of the consciousness of the American public.
Even if you agree with the changes to the rules, with all of the changes to the rules, how can anyone agree with the focused and directed effort to do it in the darkness, under wraps, to subvert the public nature of these regulatory efforts?
Things were not looking good a few years ago for the makers of atrazine, America’s second-leading weedkiller. The company was seeking approval from the Environmental Protection Agency to keep the highly profitable product on the market. But scientists were finding it was disrupting hormones in wildlife – in some cases turning frogs into bizarre creatures bearing both male and female sex organs.
Last October, concerns about the herbicide led the European Union to ban atrazine, starting in 2005. Yet that same month, after 10 years of contentious scientific review, the EPA decided to permit ongoing use in the United States with no new restrictions.
Under President Bush, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has made sometimes subtle changes in regulations that carry large consequences for workers and employers. Across the government, the Bush administration has started fewer regulations and killed more of the proposals Bush inherited than two predecessors.
A last-minute addition to an unrelated piece of legislation has created a tool for attacking the science used by federal agencies as a basis for new regulations. Industry has embraced the Data Quality Act to challenge 32 major proposals, including a successful assault on efforts to restrict the use of the herbicide atrazine.
Herbicide approvals are complicated, and there is no one reason that atrazine passed regulatory muster in this country. But close observers give significant credit to a single sentence that was added to the EPA’s final scientific assessment last year.
Hormone disruption, it read, cannot be considered a “legitimate regulatory endpoint at this time” – that is, it is not an acceptable reason to restrict a chemical’s use – because the government had not settled on an officially accepted test for measuring such disruption.
Those words, which effectively rendered moot hundreds of pages of scientific evidence, were adopted by the EPA as a result of a petition filed by a Washington consultant working with atrazine’s primary manufacturer, Syngenta Crop Protection. The petition was filed under the Data Quality Act, a little-known piece of legislation that, under President Bush’s Office of Management and Budget, has become a potent tool for companies seeking to beat back regulation.
The Data Quality Act – written by an industry lobbyist and slipped into a giant appropriations bill in 2000 without congressional discussion or debate – is just two sentences directing the OMB to ensure that all information disseminated by the federal government is reliable. But the Bush administration’s interpretation of those two sentences could tip the balance in regulatory disputes that weigh the interests of consumers and businesses.
You think maybe stunts like these are why scientists are signing petitions complaining about the politicization of science just like the armies of ex-CIA and foreign service officers are bitterly petitioning against ideology overwhelming intelligence and diplomacy? Anybody starting to see a pattern? Ideology and secrecy trumps, if not all, at least so much it’s hard not to wonder where it all ends.
Out of Spotlight, Bush Overhauls U.S. Regulations
By JOEL BRINKLEY
Published: August 14, 2004
WASHINGTON, Aug. 13 - April 21 was an unusually violent day in Iraq; 68 people died in a car bombing in Basra, among them 23 children. As the news went from bad to worse, President Bush took a tough line, vowing to a group of journalists, “We’re not going to cut and run while I’m in the Oval Office.”
On the same day, deep within the turgid pages of the Federal Register, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration published a regulation that would forbid the public release of some data relating to unsafe motor vehicles, saying that publicizing the information would cause “substantial competitive harm” to manufacturers.
As soon as the rule was published, consumer groups yelped in complaint, while the government responded that it was trying to balance the interests of consumers with the competitive needs of business. But hardly anyone else noticed, and that was hardly an isolated case.
Allies and critics of the Bush administration agree that the Sept. 11 attacks, the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq have preoccupied the public, overshadowing an important element of the president’s agenda: new regulatory initiatives. Health rules, environmental regulations, energy initiatives, worker-safety standards and product-safety disclosure policies have been modified in ways that often please business and industry leaders while dismaying interest groups representing consumers, workers, drivers, medical patients, the elderly and many others.
So where are those jobs, exactly? I mean, if that’s Bush’s aim with his regulatory policies, then I’d say that they have been disasterous failures. Unemployment is still way up from when he took office. As Bush likes to say, “results matter.”
BECKLEY, W.Va. – The coal industry chafes at the name – “mountaintop removal” – but it aptly describes the novel mining method that became popular in this part of Appalachia in the late 1980s. Miners target a green peak, scrape it bare of trees and topsoil, and then blast away layer after layer of rock until the mountaintop is gone.
In just over a decade, coal miners used the technique to flatten hundreds of peaks across a region spanning West Virginia, eastern Kentucky and Tennessee. Thousands of tons of rocky debris were dumped into valleys, permanently burying more than 700 miles of mountain streams. By 1999, concerns over the damage to waterways triggered a backlash of lawsuits and court rulings that slowed the industry’s growth to a trickle.
Today, mountaintop removal is booming again, and the practice of dumping mining debris into streambeds is explicitly protected, thanks to a small wording change to federal environmental regulations. U.S. officials simply reclassified the debris from objectionable “waste” to legally acceptable “fill.”
The “fill rule,” as the May 2002 rule change is now known, is a case study of how the Bush administration has attempted to reshape environmental policy in the face of fierce opposition from environmentalists, citizens groups and political opponents. Rather than proposing broad changes or drafting new legislation, administration officials often have taken existing regulations and made subtle tweaks that carry large consequences.
Sometimes the change hinges on a single critical phrase or definition. For example, when the Environmental Protection Agency announced proposals last year to control mercury emissions, it also moved to downgrade the “hazardous” classification of mercury pollution from power plants – a seemingly minor change that effectively gave utilities 15 more years to implement the most costly controls. Earlier this year, the Energy Department helped insert wording into a Senate bill to reclassify millions of gallons of “high-level” radioactive waste as “incidental,” a change that would spare the government the expense of removing and treating the waste.
Howard Kurtz, The Post’s media critic, weighed in on these stories last week and I missed it. Without further ado:
Bush Rules
Tuesday, Aug 17, 2004; 9:01 AM
The media have discovered George Bush’s regulatory policies and are not pleased.
By a remarkable coincidence–do they have moles in each other’s newsrooms?–the New York Times and Washington Post have weighed in with lengthy dissections of the administration quietly helping business and hurting consumers through regulations.
“Quietly,” of course, is one of those journalistic words–“little-noticed” is another–that means something important happened and we missed it and now we’re playing catchup.
In other words, why have we had to wait until 2-1/2 months before the election to read these takeouts, fine works though they are, about incredibly important subjects with huge social and economic impact?
Years ago, I covered, or kept an eye on, a number of regulatory agencies–HUD, EPA, OSHA and some others. I’ve long complained that they don’t get enough coverage, at least beyond the trade press, because they’re not considered sexy beats.
But it’s been clear since the Reagan administration that a president can change domestic policy with little interference from the Hill by working through the alphabet-soup agencies. Some of the higher-profile changes of the Bush years–from arsenic in the water to clean air and logging rules–have obviously been covered by the press. But the administration counts on many of the other changes slipping under the media radar.
This is an important debate–striking the right balance between protecting health and safety and overburdening business–that has largely been absent from the first term. The stories are more complicated, and harder to explain, than standing on the White House lawn talking about the latest poll or attack ad. That’s why they get a fraction of the journalistic resources that campaigns do.
I’m no left-wing loonie, and I do have to say that a lot of this is pretty alarming. I mean, one or two changes, sure, blame it on left-wing hyperbole. But more and more and more of these things keep happening that I keep seeing…
I’m all for protecting the rights of businesses, believe me. I totally believe in it. But there’s such a thing as going overboard. And there’s such a thing as going so far overboard that you drain the pool.
E.P.A. Accused of a Predetermined Finding on Mercury
By FELICITY BARRINGER
Published: February 4, 2005
WASHINGTON, Feb. 3 - The Environmental Protection Agency’s inspector general charged on Thursday that the agency’s senior management instructed staff members to arrive at a predetermined conclusion favoring industry when they prepared a proposed rule last year to reduce the amount of mercury emitted from coal-fired power plants.
Mercury, which can damage the neurological development of fetuses and young children, has been found in increasingly high concentrations in fish in rivers and streams in the United States.
The inspector general’s report, citing anonymous agency staff members and internal e-mail messages, said the technological and scientific analysis by the agency was “compromised” to keep cleanup costs down for the utility industry.
The goal of senior management, the report said, was to allow the agency to say that the utility industry could do just as good a job through complying with the Bush administration’s “Clear Skies” legislation as it could by installing costly equipment that a stringent mercury-control rule would require.
For generations, small farmers in Iraq operated in an essentially unregulated, informal seed supply system. Farm-saved seed and the free innovation with and exchange of planting materials among farming communities has long been the basis of agricultural practice. This has been made illegal under the new law. The seeds farmers are now allowed to plant - “protected” crop varieties brought into Iraq by transnational corporations in the name of agricultural reconstruction - will be the property of the corporations.
Unless, of course the famers just keep using their existing seed lines. Last time I checked, the Iraqi insurgents were not actually agents of Monsanto forcing them to buy GM seeds at gunpoint. But I guess intellectual dishonesty is okay as long as it isn’t coming from the Bush Administration.
I’ll confess I don’t know much about this site or it’s contentions but I do know a few related things.
The problem with ‘protected’ crops is that they can and do cross-pollinate with other plants and the offspring are also trademarked properties of the parent corporation. At least I recall reading this somewhere. This slowly rolls over the arable landscape with small farmers getting sued or put out of business if they don’t pay the fees for the hybrid crops.
The other is that, and this was no secret - it was a trumped “added value” of the invasion, many corporate interests and free market ideologues were obsessing about Iraq as a lab to install pet theories and beneficiaries. Now here I suspect that won’t end up working out. The Shiia under Sistani have asserted themselves and we really don’t have the kind of clout or control anymore that would be needed to hand tailor a government and its policies to the liking of these folks. The original plan wasn’t really for the Iraqi’s to take this kind of power for themselves for a long while. Well, surprise.
This new law means that Iraqi farmers can neither freely legally plant nor save for re-planting seeds of any plant variety registered under the plant variety provisions of the new patent law. [4] This deprives farmers what they and many others worldwide claim as their inherent right to save and replant seeds.
This new law means that Iraqi farmers can neither freely legally plant nor save for re-planting seeds of any plant variety registered under the plant variety provisions of the new patent law. [4] This deprives farmers what they and many others worldwide claim as their inherent right to save and replant seeds.
Key words: patent law
Bringing Iraq into line with the patent laws of first-world Western countries does not mean some evil transnational corporation owns the concept of grain.
[4] This deprives farmers what they and many others worldwide claim as their inherent right to save and replant seeds.
Well, yes, as long as you aren’t using a particular generic strain of a plant protected by a patent. Of course when the web site in question is virulently against GM in general, it’s no surprise that they oppose any type of intellectual property rights over generic material.
Just so I have this straight: Bremer should have the right to set the economic laws of Iraq? The Geneva convention disagrees…
I can’t tell from the CPA thing: are farmers prohibited from planting non-protected seeds or not?
Bringing Iraq into line with the patent laws of first-world Western countries does not mean some evil transnational corporation owns the concept of grain.
Guess when US patent law was brought up to European standards…
