The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed a bill called the Regulatory Accountability Act. The legislation, which is now before the Republican-controlled Senate, would make it much harder for EPA or any other federal agencies to create new regulations to protect the environment or public safety.
The bill would add bureaucratic obstacles to the rule-making process, including 29 new documentation requirements. President Obama has threatened a veto.
U.S. Rep. Tom Marino of Pennsylvania was among the House Republicans who argued the law is necessary because the Environmental Protection Agency -- and government regulations in general –have gone too far.
“I live in the middle of five farms. I’ve been there for almost two decades,” said Marino, chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform. “Recently, the EPA has attempted to get more control over farmland by saying if there’s a rainstorm and there’s a puddle where a farmer – …or a farmer even spills milk – then EPA has control over that land.”
Wait – stop. Really? EPA is seizing land from farmers because they spill glasses of milk? That is pretty extreme. Maybe Congress should rein in those bureaucrats.
To follow up, I called the Congressman’s spokesman, Ryan Shucard. I asked him: “Can you all give me an example of when EPA has taken control over a farmer’s land because the farmer spilled milk? Or for any other reason?”
Shucard replied: “Yeah, um….. He usually uses the spilled milk thing, you know, obviously, as a sort of anecdotal thing. I don’t think we have anything about the actual milk.”
No? I checked with EPA, and as it turns out, the agency has never pursued any kind of enforcement action because of a milk spill. The agency has never taken control of farmland. “While current laws and regulations typically provide for administrative, civil or criminal penalties for violating environmental statutes, EPA has no legal authority to ‘seize’ a farm or to take control of farm operations,” the EPA press office said in an email.
Ok. But what about the bigger picture: the claim by Congressional Republicans that regulations of all kinds need to be stopped because they are damaging the economy and killing jobs?
U.S. Representative Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, a Republican and sponsor of the Regulatory Accountabilty Act, said: ”Today the combined economic burden of federal taxation and regulation is over three trillion dollars – almost 20 percent of our economy. Of that, the larger part is the burden of regulation, now estimated to reach at least $1.86 trillion dollars.”
That is a big number. But where does that $1.86 trillion figure come from? I asked Congressman Marino’s office, and they told me that the source of the number is an unpublished paper called “Tip of the Costburg” by a libertarian think-tank called the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). CEI is funded in part by the Koch Brothers, billionaire industrialists who manufacture fertilizer, petrochemicals and other products, and don’t like regulation.
I sent the “Costburg” paper to Frank Ackerman, an economist and lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This was his opinion about the cost estimate: “Well, if they hid what they were doing, you’d call it fraud,” he said.
Ackerman explained that the $1.86 trillion figure includes the costs of all government regulations, going back decades, but none of the benefits – which, of course, are the whole point of the regulations, in the first place. For example, the number includes the cost of filtering soot air pollution from the smokestacks of coal fired power plants, but not the much greater financial and social benefit of fewer emergency room visits for asthma and heart attacks.
“It’s an absurd approach,” Ackerman said of the calculation. “If you were certain that there were never any possible benefits to government activity, and just wanted to add up how much it cost, it’s conceivable you’d come up with a cost like that ($1.86 trillion). But nobody does things like that, on the assumption that there are zero benefits.”
To give a concrete example of the “Tip of the Costburg” method, Ackerman said we should consider the costs vs. benefits of a government program operating in every town in America.
“Your town undoubtedly spends money installing and maintaining traffic lights,” Ackerman said. “If you are sure there are no benefits to traffic lights, you could say, ’Hey, let’s save money by taking them all down.’ But the reason that any sensible community has traffic lights at busy intersections is that they reduce accidents and they reduce deaths. Is that an imaginary benefit? It seems to me that is a very real benefit.”
Most economic studies over the last half century have concluded that environmental regulations are not job killers --and in fact, usually create as many jobs as they displace or destroy.
So, if this debate is not really about jobs, then what is behind the Republican majority’s anti-regulatory legislation?
In the end, this has nothing to do with farmers or spilled milk. Big industries – like fertilizer factories, coal-fired power plants and oil refineries -- have a direct financial interest in obstructing regulation of their polluting businesses.
That includes industries owned by the Koch Brothers, whose entities gave money not only to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, but also to the campaigns of Representatives Marino, Goodlatte and many others in Congress.
The Koch Brothers have announced they will pump almost a billion dollars into the next election cycle, even as they pump millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The Kochs – and other big business owners – are the ones with the real motive to undermine EPA.
