Except when political appointees override the judgment of career federal scientists (as when a White House staffer rewrote an Environmental Protection Agency report on global warming to highlight scientific uncertainty), the nonpolitical staff at regulatory agencies can generally see through these crude efforts to create doubt. And Congress has refused to pass the Bush administration's attempts, such as the initiative with the Orwellian name "Clear Skies," to weaken environmental laws.

Clearly frustrated, the White House is making a run around Congress to change the way the agencies conduct risk assessments, the studies that form the basis for health protections. The Office of Management and Budget has proposed mandatory "guidelines" that would require agencies to conduct impossibly comprehensive risk assessments before issuing scientific or technical documents, including the rules polluters have to follow.

What appears at first blush to be good government reform is in fact a backdoor attempt to undermine existing environmental laws. If this is successful, the uncertainty manufactured by polluters will be written into federal risk assessments, providing the justification to weaken public health protection.

[A]s academics and policymakers clamor to distance themselves from the now dowdy and stilted fashions of 1970s-style “command-and-control regulation” and to embrace the virtues of the free market, privatization has replaced government intervention as the preferred solution to the tragedy of the commons. Right wing ideologues pump out books, articles, and monographs touting the virtues of “free-market environmentalism” and claiming that all environmental problems can eventually be solved by simply defining and enforcing private property rights and allowing the free market to function.7 But even more moderate voices, who point out the obvious impracticality of privatizing many natural resources, still hurry to agree that privatization is superior to government regulation and should therefore be pursued where ever practicable.8 Thus, extremists and moderates alike tout any environmental policy that looks or smells anything like private property or a market as either an example of a practical implementation of the privatization alternative, or as an “intermediate” or “hybrid” scheme that is moving us in the right direction — that is, closer to the privatization solution and away from government regulation.9 In this vein, water markets, emissions trading schemes, transferable fishing quotas, and private land ownership are all touted as examples of the triumph of privatization over the flawed, second-best alternative of government regulation.

[I] argue that all of this talk about private property and market regimes generating an alternative to government regulation of environmental problems is in fact nothing more than a mirage. It has generated a lot of misperceptions about the extent to which government regulation can be dispensed with, and a lot of muddled thinking about exactly what privatization is and under what circumstances it can actually “solve” the tragedy of the commons. In fact, on close inspection, it becomes apparent that simply defining and enforcing private property rights does not necessarily “solve” the tragedy of the commons. It is only under a very limited and idealized set of circumstances that the delineation of property rights and/or the creation of markets actually solves the tragedy by aligning private incentives so as to prevent the overexploitation of resources and the over-production of pollution.

The nation's commercial nuclear power plants are potential targets for terrorists seeking to cause the release of radioactive material. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), an independent agency headed by five commissioners, is responsible for regulating and overseeing security at the plants. In April 2003, in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, NRC revised the design basis threat (DBT), which describes the threat that plants must be prepared to defend against in terms of the number of attackers and their training, weapons, and tactics. NRC has also restructured its program for testing security at the plants through force-on-force inspections, which consist of mock terrorist attacks.

NRC revised the DBT for nuclear power plants using a generally logical and well-defined process in which trained threat assessment staff made recommendations for changes based on an analysis of demonstrated terrorist capabilities. The process resulted in a DBT requiring plants to defend against a larger terrorist threat, including a larger number of attackers, a refined and expanded list of weapons, and an increase in the maximum size of a vehicle bomb. Key elements of the revised DBT, such as the number of attackers, generally correspond to the NRC threat assessment staff's original recommendations, but other important elements do not. For example, the NRC staff made changes to some recommendations after obtaining feedback from stakeholders, including the nuclear industry, which objected to certain proposed changes such as the inclusion of certain weapons. NRC officials said the changes resulted from further analysis of intelligence information. Nevertheless, GAO found that the process used to obtain stakeholder feedback created the appearance that changes were made based on what the industry considered reasonable and feasible to defend against rather than on an assessment of the terrorist threat itself.

Nuclear power plants made substantial security improvements in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks and the revised DBT, including security barriers and detection equipment, new protective strategies, and additional security officers. It is too early, however, to conclude that all sites are capable of defending against the DBT because, as of November 1, 2005, NRC had conducted force-on-force inspections at about one-third of the plants. NRC has improved its force-on-force inspections--for example, by conducting inspections more frequently at each site. Nevertheless, in observing three inspections and discussing the program with NRC, GAO noted potential issues in the inspections that warrant NRC's continued attention. For example, a lapse in the protection of information about the planned scenario for a mock attack GAO observed may have given the plant's security officers knowledge that allowed them to perform better than they otherwise would have. A classified version of this report provides additional details about the DBT and security at nuclear power plants.