Back on January 18th President Obama issued Executive Order 13563 requiring federal agencies to consider the impacts of new regulations and to perform a self assessment of existing regulations. For existing regulations, the President requested the agencies perform an analysis to determine whether rules are "outmoded, ineffective, insufficient, or excessively burdensome."
After performing self-examinations, each agency was ordered to do the following:
"Within 120 days of the date of this order, each agency shall develop
and submit to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs a preliminary
plan,..to determine whether any such regulations should be modified, streamlined, expanded, or repealed so as to make the agency’s regulatory program more effective or less burdensome in achieving the regulatory objectives." (emphasis added)
On May 24th, U.S. EPA issued its preliminary plan, titled "Improving Our Regulations: A Preliminary Plan for Periodic Retrospective Reviews of Existing Regulations." EPAs preliminary plan falls way short of the goals articulated in the President’s Order.
Specifically, the preliminary plan calls for very little review of existing regulations to determine if they should be modified or repealed. In fact, the EPA’s plan in some cases calls for new regulations, including:
- SSO Blending Rule
- MACT Rules to "reduce emissions through the use of technologies and practices to achieve multiple benefits"
In other cases, EPA calls for additional rules to "clarify" or "streamline" requirements. Often efforts to clarify simply mean additional regulations increasing complexity:
- Water Quality standards- EPA intends to clarify antidegredation and variance provisions, among other requirements;
- Clean Air Act Title V- streamline by use of electronic filings
What is missing from EPA’s proposal is an acknowledgment that some key regulatory programs should be reviewed to determine if there is simply a more efficient and effective way to achieve the same goals. Or, whether some regulations are outdated.
EPA Should Listen to the Business Community in Developing its Plan
The President’s Order only gave U.S. EPA 120 days to develop a preliminary plan. That did not leave much time for public input prior to development of the plan. The EPA’s plan is open for public comment until June 27th. Click here to an EPA link to comment on the plan
Because EPA has already developed its plan pursuant to the Order its much harder to make wholesale changes to plan that is already in writing. More than likely, EPA will tweak the existing plan some based on the comments it receives.
However, by simply packaging some existing tweaks to rules and policies as its regulatory analysis EPA is simply playing around the edges. EPA is missing a golden opportunity to look at fundamentally overhauling its more complex and controversial rules. While I believe there are multiple examples of regulations that deserve a complete overhaul, I think one particular program serves as a shining example:
New Source Review- The NSR program is highly complex. It also involves far too much subjectivity. Courts have reached vastly different conclusions regarding whether NSR was triggered in cases involving very similar projects and fact patterns. To make matters worse, NSR has recently been applied to greenhouse gases which raises dramatically the impact of the program. Perhaps no EPA program symbolizes more the frustration of the regulated community and is in serious need of review/overhaul.