By Dino Grandoni / The Washington Post
This is your umpteenth reminder that as some Environmental Protection Agency aides are seeking to procure moisturizing lotion and a used mattress for their boss, other staff at the agency are doing consequential policy work.
Scott Pruitt’s agency took the initial step this week toward changing how it calculates the economic benefits and costs of regulatory decisions, a revision long sought by conservative allies of President Donald Trump, according to a Post report.
Under many environmental laws, the EPA is required to tabulate the economic pros and cons of measures imposed on companies to reduce air and water pollution. For years under President Barack Obama, conservatives complained that agency officials overestimated the health and financial benefits of reducing carbon emissions from power plants.
So on Thursday, the EPA announced it will solicit comments from companies, nonprofits and members of the public about how to do such cost-benefit analyses differently — bringing into the agency a long-running debate over how the government justifies new rules.
“Many have complained that the previous administration inflated the benefits and underestimated the costs of its regulations through questionable cost-benefit analysis,” Pruitt said in a statement Thursday. “This action is the next step toward providing clarity and real-world accuracy with respect to the impact of the Agency’s decisions on the economy and the regulated community.”
Pruitt’s EPA argues that environmental laws are inconsistent in describing how such analyses are done and is pushing for what it calls uniformity and transparency. The nation’s major anti-pollution laws, the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, along with a number of other statutes, require the EPA to conduct cost-benefit analyses when writing new rules.
Environmental groups reacted to the EPA’s announcement with dismay. Ana Unruh Cohen, managing director for government affairs at the Natural Resources Defense Council, suggested such rulemaking could obscure the benefits of anti-pollution rules to the public.
Pruitt’s actions are “founded on a big lie: that federal rules cost more than the benefits,” Cohen said. “In fact, the opposite is true — by a country mile.”
Michael Greenstone, an economics professor at the University of Chicago who served on Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, said the EPA’s notice for the proposal was itself fairly “vapid,” but the news release that accompanied it critically singled out examples of analyses from the Obama administration, suggesting the EPA is heading in a particular direction.
For instance, the agency faulted the way the Obama administration took into account co-benefits, those that come from “reduced emissions of a pollutant that is not the actual target pollutant of a regulation.” The proposal cited the Clean Power Plan, which targeted carbon dioxide emissions but justified the regulation based on the ample benefits from reducing the health impacts of particulate air pollution, which decreases along with CO2 when fossil fuels are burned at a lower rate.
“The way I like to think about it is, if I press a button and something good happens, why would I want to not count half of the good that is produced by pressing that button?” Greenstone said. “There’s no explanation given.”
Greenstone added that Pruitt seems to already have in mind the answer to the question on which the agency is seeking comment. “This appears to be policy-based evidence making. Where you set the policy, and then you go backwards and manufacture the evidence,” he said.
Another common complaint among conservatives, according to Diane Katz, a senior fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, is that the EPA compared the domestic costs of reducing carbon emissions against the global benefits of mitigating climate change.
“We’ve seen them use a number of tricks that we find troubling,” Katz said of Obama’s EPA.
Lisa Heinzerling, a law professor at Georgetown University who served in the agency under Obama, noted the proposal applies only to how the EPA does things. Mostly, the agency has not been regulating, she said, but moving to deregulate.
Under Trump, the EPA has sought to change the way its researchers review science. Now with this announcement, the agency is taking aim at the way it does economics.
In April, Pruitt moved to limit which studies the EPA can use in writing regulations to only those for which the underlying data is made public, excluding some landmark research that involves confidential personal or medical histories or proprietary information.
“The striking thing about this and the science proposal is, those are the two really major regulatory initiatives of this administration, and they’re both directed at the agency,” Heinzerling said.
“The only thing they’re regulating is themselves,” she said. “And the reason they’re doing that I think is that in the future, the agency will have to go through rulemaking to undo whatever they do here.”
The announcement earned quick praise from Republicans in Congress, just as some of them seem to be expressing doubts about the number of scandals piling up about Pruitt’s management and spending decisions. The news came at a good time for the administration — during a week in which new revelations surfaced about enlisting EPA staff to help him pick up his dry cleaning and try to secure for his wife a Chick-fil-A franchise.
“During the Obama administration, the Environmental Protection Agency exaggerated the benefits of Washington regulations and misjudged how costly they are to the economy,” Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said in a statement Thursday. “Now the Trump administration is taking important steps to make sure the agency can no longer abuse the cost-benefit analysis process.”
POWER PLAYS
• EPA Mad Libs: If you picked “moisturizer” and “dry cleaning,” you are correct. Pruitt asked his security detail to run errands for him that have included picking up his dry cleaning and driving him to multiple Ritz-Carlton hotel locations in search of his favorite moisturizer, The Post reports. “While EPA security agents are required to protect Pruitt at all times – both while he is working and during his off hours – [two individuals familiar with those trips] said the administrator had asked members of the detail to perform tasks that go beyond their primary function,” Josh Dawsey, Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis write. “In one instance, they said, he directed agents to drive him to multiple locations in search of a particular lotion on offer at Ritz-Carlton hotels. One other occasions, they added, he asked agents to pick up his dry cleaning without him.”
Multiple EPA staffers also told the Daily Beast that Pruitt sent them out to retrieve his favorite snacks, including sweets, cookies, and Greek yogurt. “I can’t tell you how many times I was sent out to get protein bars on the orders of [Pruitt],” one person told the publication. “Pruitt has been known to send staffers on these errands at least twice a week, with some sources describing his demands as ‘constant.’”
Asked about the specific errands Pruitt’s security team ran for the administrator, an EPA spokeswoman told The Post: “Administrator Pruitt follows the same security protocol whether he’s in his personal or official capacity.”
• There’s a second dry-cleaning story out of the EPA: In a major win for the chemical industry, the Trump administration will narrow the way it determines health and safety risks associated with the most dangerous toxic chemicals on the market, such as dry-cleaning solvents and paint strippers, The New York Times reported. “Under a law passed by Congress during the final year of the Obama administration, the EPA was required for the first time to evaluate hundreds of potentially toxic chemicals and determine if they should face new restrictions, or even be removed from the market,” per the report. “Instead, the agency will focus on possible harm caused by direct contact with a chemical in the workplace or elsewhere. The approach means that the improper disposal of chemicals – leading • About that Chick-fil-A job: While Pruitt tried to help his wife become a Chick-fil-A franchise owner, such a job never came to fruition. It turns out “it’s really, really hard to open a Chick-fil-A franchise, even without the pull of a government agency,” The Post’s Rachel Siegel explained. Every year, 40,000 people send the company inquiries about becoming a restaurant operator, but about 100 to 115 make it through the process.
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