Bush Forces a Shift In Regulatory Thrust(regulation is unnecessary)

[papau]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1315-2004Aug14.html

Bush Forces a Shift In Regulatory Thrust(regulation is unnecessary)

OSHA Made More Business-Friendly

By Amy Goldstein and Sarah Cohen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, August 15, 2004; Page A01

First of three articles

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 (on the last day of 2003,...the administration canceled the rules). <snip>

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 . <snip>

To examine this process, The Washington Post explored the Bush administration's approach to regulation from three perspectives. This article about OSHA traces the impact on one regulatory agency. Tomorrow's story will look at a lobbyist's 32-line, last-minute addition to a bill that created a tool for attacking the science used to support new regulations. Tuesday's article will document a one-word change in a regulation that allowed coal companies to accelerate efforts to strip away the tops of thousands of Appalachian mountains.

<snip>The analysis, combined with the more detailed look at specific regulatory decisions, shows how an administration can employ this subtle aspect of presidential power to implement far-reaching policy changes. Most of the decisions are made without the public attention that accompanies congressional debate. Under Bush, these decisions have spanned logging in national forests, patients' rights in government health insurance programs, tests for tainted packaged meats, Indian land transactions and grants to religious charities.<snip>


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3733-2004Aug15.html
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

'Data Quality' Law Is Nemesis Of Regulation

By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 16, 2004; Page A01

Second of three articles

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.<snip>

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. <snip>

[meti57b]

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