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When Facts Don't Matter
| Reece Rushing is a policy analyst at OMB Watch, a research and advocacy organization that monitors the activities of the Office of Management and Budget. |
In his new book, Paul Krugman calls the Bush administration a "revolutionary power." It knows what it wants. It vigorously pursues its radical agenda. And it won't be deterred by contrary evidence. In fact, it will manufacture evidence for its case where none exists.
Krugman rests his argument on the war in Iraq and the Bush tax cuts for the rich, but he could have just as easily used the administration's approach to clean air regulation. Last month, the White House Office of Management and Budget put out a report that concluded, in economic terms, the benefits of environmental regulation swamp the costs. Four major clean air standards have been particularly effective, the report found, producing estimated annual benefits of $101 to $119 billion and costs of less than $9 billion.
Yet instead of building on this success, the Bush administration is turning back the clock. Just weeks before OMB's report, EPA gutted emissions standards for the nation's oldest and dirtiest power plants, in what Sen. James Jeffords (I-Vt.) called "the biggest rollback of the Clean Air Act in history." The administration incredibly insists its changes will improve air quality, yet a new report by the General Accounting Office found that EPA could produce no data to support this claim. Facts had nothing to do with the decision.
Likewise, the administration continues to press for adoption of its Orwellian "Clear Skies Initiative," which would actually allow more power-plant emissions than simply implementing and enforcing current law. EPA recently determined that this plan—which not surprisingly, is backed by industry—is far less effective (and only marginally less expensive) than alternative bipartisan legislation. Yet instead of accepting this verdict, the administration first buried the analysis and then stuck to its guns when it was eventually leaked to Congress.
On global warming, the story is no different. In May 2002, President Bush disavowed an EPA report to the United Nations that lay blame for global warming on human activity, juxtaposing the seriousness of the problem with the administration's unwillingness to do anything about it. "I read the report put out by the bureaucracy," the president responded dismissively. A year later, the White House pushed EPA to drop reference to similar findings from an environmental anthology, and instead highlight a study partially funded by the American Petroleum Institute that questioned global warming. EPA ultimately chose to delete the entire section.
OMB, which has review authority over agency regulation, is at least acknowledging the benefits of clean air. However, this seems to be viewed as an accident and hasn't changed its anti-regulatory bent. OMB's air tabulations draw from a multi-year retrospective study by EPA, which was approved by a prestigious panel of outside experts in 1997. OMB is clearly uncomfortable with the conclusions, yet the study stands as the most comprehensive examination of regulatory effectiveness ever done. OMB has little choice but to use it, albeit with some tinkering.
In last year's report (the report is an annual requirement), this tinkering caused OMB to overstate the costs of clean air rules by a whopping $20 billion—a mistake that likely would have been caught were OMB not predisposed to accept high regulatory costs. OMB corrected its error in this year's report—revealing huge net regulatory benefits—yet it continues to pursue an agenda that is hostile to environmental protection.
Indeed, the same report also includes decision-making guidelines that raise the bar for new regulation. These guidelines are constructed to produce "evidence" to validate the administration's preexisting agenda—by among other things spelling out analytical methods for monetizing regulatory benefits.
To many the idea of putting a price tag on human life, health, or the environment will sound morally abhorrent. Yet in the Bush administration's world of devising regulation, this is par for the course (even though it is contrary to the law in the case of environmental regulation, which must be based on the "best technology available"). The methods used can have a profound effect on whether action appears worthwhile.
For example, the administration's regulatory czar and architect of the guidelines, John Graham, came under fire this past spring for pushing EPA to devalue the lives of senior citizens in calculating benefits associated with "Clear Skies" and a court-mandated standard to reduce air pollution from snowmobiles (which annually discharge about 530,000 tons of carbon monoxide and 200,000 tons of hydrocarbons). Graham forced EPA to weaken the snowmobile standard using this analysis, scoring the lives of those over 70 at 63 percent of those younger.
This "senior death discount," as it's been called, derives from a 1982 British survey that suggested the elderly are less willing to pay for regulatory benefits (which has special significance for clean air standards aimed at preventing cancer or other diseases of old age). However, a 2002 study by Resources for the Future could not replicate these results in the United States, and the survey's author recently told The Miami Herald, "I certainly wouldn't argue for my 1982 figure." After protest by the AARP and environmental groups, Graham backed off and renounced the method.
Nonetheless, Graham's guidelines carry forward the underlying premise, encouraging among other things that federal agencies calculate regulatory benefits using "life years" saved (in addition to lives saved). This again skews against protections for the elderly, who have fewer life years remaining, and deflates projected benefits—ignoring the lessons of OMB's report, which shows that predicted benefits have been consistently underestimated while costs have been consistently overestimated.
"In fact, the OMB report makes clear that the weakness in analyzing the likely impact of new environmental rules lay in a highly conservative calculation of benefits," wrote William Reilly, former EPA administrator under the president's father, in a Washington Post op-ed, noting that the agency had also substantially overestimated costs for a host of protections, including catalytic converters on cars, the phaseout of lead in gasoline, and acid rain controls.
Graham's guidelines exacerbate this tendency, resulting in distorted analysis that supports weaker regulation. Of course, this is the Bush game plan. The agenda drives the information, not the other way around.
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