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News & Analysis | REG•WATCH Blog | Press Room
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
For Mysterious Occupational Risk Rule, Shenanigans Abound
Details about a mysterious Department of Labor (DOL) rule on occupational health risks are beginning to surface. In today's Washington Post, reporter Carol Leonnig sheds new light on the situation.
The Post obtained an early draft of the rule which Reg•Watch and others have been speculating about for the past couple weeks. The Post's account gives credence to some of the suspicion:
[The rule] would call for reexamining the methods used to measure risks posed by workplace exposure to toxins. The change would address long-standing complaints from businesses that the government overestimates the risk posed by job exposure to chemicals.
The rule would also require the agency to take an extra step before setting new limits on chemicals in the workplace by allowing an additional round of challenges to agency risk assessments.
Including an opportunity for additional challenges is likely an effort to give industry trade groups and the anti-regulatory crowd an opportunity to attack and undermine the science that serves as the basis for occupational health protections.
Critics say the rule is being pushed through under Bush's tenure in order to tie the hands of a future administration. The Post article quotes David Michaels, an expert on public health and industry influence in government science, as saying: "This is a guarantee to keep any more worker safety regulation from ever coming out of OSHA. This is being done in secrecy, to be sprung before President Bush leaves office, to cripple the next administration."
The easy path the rule has taken through the usually daunting regulatory labyrinth raises further suspicion. Leonnig describes several issues which indicate the Bush administration is intentionally hiding its activities on this rule from the public.
First, the rule was not included in the Labor Department's most recent Unified Agenda. The Unified Agenda is a semiannual listing of all the regulatory actions an agency is considering with an identification of their status, i.e. long-term action, proposed rule, or final rule. The Unified Agenda is often the public's first public indication that the federal government is considering some new rule.
Because the last Unified Agenda came out in April, it is possible that an agency could conjure up new regulatory ideas and then propose the action without prior public notification. But, according to the Post article, that's not the case with DOL's risk assessment rule. When DOL published its most recent Unified Agenda, "a draft was circulating among a small group of advisers, according to a date-stamped copy obtained by The Post."
Second, senior officials in DOL are not even tapping into the wealth of occupational health knowledge within the Department. Politicos in DOL did not consult with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration or the Mine Safety and Health Administration, the two agencies responsible for protecting workers and most likely to be affected by revisions to the occupational risk assessment process.
Instead, "Deborah Misir, a political deputy in Labor's office of the assistant secretary for policy, worked with the OMB to draft a new risk-assessment rule," according to The Post. DOL also paid $349,000 to an outside consultant, Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the conservative Hudson Institute, to study the risk assessment process, The Post reports.
Finally, both DOL and OMB are ignoring a recent memo sent by White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten that instructed agencies to propose by June 1 any regulation they wish to finalize before the end of the Bush administration. Even though the occupational risk assessment rule has yet to be proposed, OMB and DOL are working together to finalize it by year's end, according to The Post.
The White House framed the Bolten memo as a good government measure, but the shenanigans surrounding the DOL rule — and OMB's endorsement of those shenanigans — clearly shoot a hole through that argument. The memo will have no impact on the White House's ongoing regulatory strategy: stifle any regulations it doesn't like, and surreptitiously hustle through those it does.
Posted by Matt Madia
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