The Trump administration’s latest attempt to subvert use of cost-benefit analysis in regulatory proceedings, a Dec. 9 rulemaking on air pollution rules, is a “paper tiger,” according to veteran environmental economist at the venerable think tank Resources for the Future Alan Krupnick. At a fortuitous RFF zoom meeting on cost-benefit analysis just a day after the new EPA rule, Krupnick said, “I don’t think this rule is going to tie the new administration’s hand.”
The outgoing Trump administration issued its new rule, the Washington Post reported, instructing the agency in the future to disregard “many of the incidental benefits that arise, such as illnesses and deaths avoided by a potential regulation” when calculating the costs and benefits of a regulatory proposal. The Trump administration has downplayed regulatory benefits and emphasized costs, including incidental costs, except when it serves their interests to include incident benefits. “Trump decided he was going to deregulate and cost-benefit analysis be damned,” Krupnick said.
The purpose of the RFF meeting, planned well before the EPA rule became final, was to discuss a new book by Richard Revesz and Michael Livermore, both law professors and author of a new book, “Reviving Rationality: Saving Cost-Benefit Analysis for the Sake of the Environment and Our Health.” They were joined in the discussion by RFF’s Dick Morgenstern, Krupnick, Sally Katzen of NYU, Joseph Aldy of Harvard’s Kennedy School, and Jonathan Wiener of Duke’s School of Law.
The new EPA rule, Krupnick said, does not say regulators can’t use “ancillary benefits, they just have to separate them out. That is not going to tie the Biden administration’s hand.” Many expect the new administration will scrap the EPA rule and return to the bi-partisan approach that has backed cost-benefit analysis for 40 years, since inaugurated formally by the Regan administration in 1980.
Livermore said there has been “quite a bit of continuity between administrations,” although there may have been “somewhat different approaches.” Kasten noted that when Reagan pushed cost-benefit analysis and establish the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the White House Office of Management and Budget, conservatives were ecstatic. Now, as conservatives try to undercut cost-benefit analysis, liberals are up in arms. She headed OIRA in the Clinton administration.
Duke’s Wiener said the Trump administration has not repealed the Clinton Executive Order 12866 or OMB Circular A-4, which provide “very good basis for the Biden-Harris administration.”
A new paper from the University of California at Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment, “Reversing Environmental Rollbacks,” found, “Reversing the environmental rollbacks from the last four years will require sustained effort by federal agencies to engage in notice-and-comment rulemaking to repeal and, in many cases, replace regulations. However, there are a number of rollbacks that were carried out through executive order, agency guidance, and discretionary actions. These rollbacks can be swiftly reversed by President-elect Joe Biden and new heads of federal agencies. While a handful of these actions may be taken immediately through presidential executive order, many will have to be taken in the days and weeks following.”
–Kennedy Maize