For the eight years of the Bush administration, the political appointees in the departments and agencies were tasked with creating an enduring legacy of rules that benefit commercial interests over the public interest. Which was to be expected, when James Watts' alcolytes ran Interior, and former pesticide lobbyists were making policy regarding pesticide regulation. That was part of the general pattern of placing people in agencies and departments who were fundamentally opposed to their missions as set by law, or who actively supported the interests of the industries they were supposedly regulating, and expected to work for them (again) after leaving their government posts.
The result is a toxic legacy of regulations that require thorough review and revision, to restore their rightful function of protecting the environment and the public interest.
How best to do that? One might just start reading CFR (Code of Federal Regulation) Sections, and flag any that seem problematic. But, that is not a practical approach, given that EPA's Title 40, alone, contains over 18,000 separate sections and nearly 1.5 million lines of text.
Instead, it would be far preferable to use available tools to do automated searches to find the changes made during the Bush administration, review those changes to rank them according to the degree of harm they are causing, then initiate the revision process where needed.
An initial version of process has been applied to Title 33 (Army Corps) and Title 40 (EPA). The end result is that changes are displayed side-by-side, color-highlighted, in HTML pages viewable by any browser. For one example, see 33CFR323, that was revised to make it easy for the Army Corps to approve mountaintop removal mining operations: http://restoringsanity.org/cfr/2000_2007_diffs/33/33cfr323_diff_mod.html
With only a couple of days of time to set up and "fine-tune" the process for Title 40, a few minutes of text crunching immediately showed that 7,500 of the over 12,000 Sections in common between the 2000 and 2008 versions had zero changes in the text, and could be excluded from the initial review. Another 1,900 Sections had 10 or fewer lines with apparent changes, and likely did not include any substantive changes. The time and cost savings of that approach should be quite obvious, even for subject-matter-specific reviews of regulations. Atrazine, for example, is referred to in 24 separate CFR Sections of Title 40 and Title 21.
The same process could be applied to any (all) CFR sections, and the results placed in a generally accessible location. See, for example, Title 40, at http://restoringsanity.org/cfr/2000_2008_diffs/40/. Reviewers within a given agency would have easy access to the diff files, regardless of their location. Also, open government goals are advanced, because the review process can include both cross-agency participation in the case of overlapping jurisdiction, and public participation by stakeholders and subject matter experts outside of government.
The above approach solves the problem of universal availability of the rules for review by any interested party. The remaining non-trivial task is to set up the tools that allow all reviewers to provide input to those who are responsible for initiating and effecting any changes to the rules.
Comments (1)
The Bush Administration, while a recent and extreme example of rulemaking power abuse, is not the only bad actor. Regular review of the CRF (and the whole USC) should be done to look for inconsistencies and provisions that could be repealed. This could be done by the CRS or OMB, a citizen's advisory committee, a committee appointed by the courts, the ABA, or even a computer-aided approach through the Office of the President.