Featured Blog, Sean Hackbarth

EPA Doesn’t Check to See if Its Expensive Regulations are Working

EPA Doesn't CheckFederal regulators write a lot of regulations—over 500 just in October 2015—but they don’t check to see if those regulations are working, researchers find.

Sofie Miller of The George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center looked at 22 federal regulations costing $100 million or more annually. “Of the 22 rules we examined, not a single one included a plan for review,” Miller wrote.

Checking their work is rarely on regulators’ radar:

While agencies often provide a wealth of information on the anticipated effects of their rules, they seldom return to a rule to evaluate whether the benefits and costs they anticipated actually materialized.

This is happening despite the Regulatory Flexibility Act requirement that regulations be review periodically to see if they're still needed.

Along with federal law, President Obama issued an Executive Order requiring agencies to review regulations already on the books “to determine whether any such regulations should be modified, streamlined, expanded, or repealed so as to make the agency’s regulatory program more effective or less burdensome in achieving the regulatory objectives.”

The paper examined three regulations of particular note from EPA:

  • Waters of the United States (WOTUS) redefinition
  • Clean Power Plan
  • Carbon regulations for new power plants

In all three cases, EPA has no plan for determining if any of the regulations will do what they’re intended. In the case of WOTUS, regulators didn’t even identify the problem WOTUS is intended to solve.

This is further evidence showing that the federal regulatory process is broken and systemic reform is needed. It’s apparent that federal regulators’ standard operating procedure is to write regulation after regulation after regulation without pausing to see if its past efforts are working.

Businesses and the public don’t oppose regulations. They just want rules that make sense. They want regulations that are based on sound science, good data, and transparency. And at the very least, they expect the regulations they live under to do what they’re supposed to do.

That’s not a lot to ask.