The Bush administration is moving at warp speed to finalize a rule that will allow government-approved projects to intrude on the habitats of endangered species.

The Department of the Interior received about 300,000 public comments, mostly negative, on its proposal after it was unveiled in August. According to an internal email obtained by the Associated Press, Interior wants to review all the public comments in just four days:

In an e-mail last week to Fish and Wildlife managers across the country, Bryan Arroyo, the head of the agency's endangered species program, said the team would work eight hours a day starting Tuesday to the close of business on Friday to sort through the comments. …

At that rate, according to a [House Natural Resources Committee] aide's calculation, 6,250 comments would have to be reviewed every hour. That means that each member of the team would be reviewing at least seven comments each minute.

That gives each comment just enough time to slide across someone's desk, directly into the trash. Welcome to the federal rulemaking process, thanks for participating.

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne instructed the agency to review all the comments this week, according to AP.

Kempthorne is obviously trying to hurry the rule out the door before President Bush himself is hurried out the door. A new president may not cotton to the idea of government-approved projects threatening endangered species.

Interior's proposal would allow federal land-use managers to approve projects like infrastructure creation, minerals extraction, or logging without consulting habitat managers and biological health experts responsible for species protection.

Allowing agencies to bypass expert scientific review for development projects runs counter to long-standing practices required by the Endangered Species Act. The act requires project managers to request from Interior "information whether any species which is listed or proposed to be listed may be present in the area" where construction will occur.

Kempthorne may be trying to comply with a deadline set by White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten. In a May memo, Bolten instructed Bush administration agencies to finalize regulations by November 1.

But the endangered species rule has already violated other provisions in the memo. Bolten also instructed agencies to propose rules by June 1. (Probably so agency officials wouldn't be stuck reviewing hundreds of thousands of comments in just a few days.) The endangered species rule was not published until Aug. 15.

Other peculiarities have signaled Kempthorne's intent to ramrod this rule through the regulatory pipeline. Interior initially announced only a 30-day comment period. (Comment periods usually last 60 days; Interior extended the period to 60 days after public outcry.) Also, OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs — the White House office in charge of reviewing agency rules — spent only three days looking at the endangered species changes. OIRA's average review time for Interior Department rules in 2008 is 58 days.

So despite the overwhelming public opposition and the time constraints on the agency's ability to give this major policy shift careful consideration, Kempthorne will plow ahead. The rule would be a feather in Bush administration's cap; Bush's record on protecting endangered species is abysmal. Stay tuned to Reg•Watch for updates.

The Environmental Protection Agency exaggerates its penalties on polluters according to a new GAO report to be released later today, AP reports. GAO charges that EPA overstates its total penalty amounts by including fines that are never actually collected. From AP:

The levied fines in 2004, 2005 and 2006 included a total of $227.2 million in so-called default judgments. The agency admitted these hard-to-collect fines were larger in those years; GAO said they are unlikely to be collected.

It took a GAO report to uncover this problem because information on EPA penalties is not readily available to the public; and Bush administration officials would like to keep it that way. EPA's head of enforcement activities, Granta Nakayama, told GAO, "We do not believe that penalties collected should be publicly reported."

Instead, EPA reports when fines are levied. (It makes for better press releases when the agency announces it is cracking down on polluters.) So not only is EPA being disingenuous with the information it presents, it would prefer to withhold the really important information from the public.

The follow through is the key to meaningful deterrence. Industry needs to know it will be held, at the very least, financially accountable for violations of environmental laws. The public needs to know EPA is aggressively policing environmental scofflaws and that fines are finding their way into public coffers.

The picture GAO paints is part of a much larger body of work illustrating the Bush administration's poor record on environmental enforcement. Voluntary compliance and chummy cooperation have severed the long arm of the law. According to AP, "Fines levied against polluters by the EPA decreased from $240.6 million in 1998 to $137.7 million in 2007."

Update: Download the GAO report here

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has finalized a long-awaited rule that will protect the North Atlantic right whale, one of the planet's most critically endangered marine species. Fewer than 400 right whales are left, according to NOAA.

The rule sets a speed limit on shipping vessels traveling in the Atlantic during seasons when the right whale is most active. NOAA maintained the speed limit in its initial proposal: 10 knots. That is good news, since collisions with ships are a major threat to right whales. According to The Washington Post, "Since NOAA first proposed the regulation in 2006, at least three right whales have died from ship strikes, and two have been wounded by propellers."

However, as expected, another aspect of NOAA's final rule is weaker than originally proposed. NOAA initially proposed extending the protection area in which the speed limit would be enforced 30 nautical miles off shore. In the final rule, NOAA shrank the protection zone to only 20 nautical miles.

The smaller protection zone encompasses a smaller portion of right whale activity. From the Post:

Researchers at NOAA's Fisheries Service estimate that about 83 percent of right whale sightings in the mid-Atlantic region are within 20 nautical miles of shore, while the 30-mile limit would encompass 90 percent of all sightings.

The White House could have played a role in weakening the rule. The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs — the arm of the White House responsible for reviewing and editing agency regulations — kept the rule under its watch for 573 days. By its own rules, OIRA is to review rules for no longer than 120 days.

During that time, several other White House offices attacked the scientific basis for NOAA's plan to protect the right whale. The office of Vice President Dick Cheney said, "[W]e have no evidence (i.e., hard data) that lowering the speeds of 'large ships' will actually make a difference." The White House Council of Economic Advisors even went so far as to rerun statistical models the agency used to come to its determination.

The White House may have been working on behalf of industry. The World Shipping Council opposed the rule, and lobbied the White House to stop it.

Indeed, a NOAA official told The Washington Post in August, ""Time is money in shipping. There was a concern about the increased cost to carriers … We accommodated that by reducing the speed zones."

At least now all this mishegas is finally over. The rule will go into effect in December. (The Ocean Conservancy has more on the areas and times of year of enforcement.) If the rule is properly enforced, it will significantly increase the right whale's chances of survival.

The long-awaited rule to protect the North Atlantic right whale is coming soon, according to President Bush himself. Speaking at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History on Friday, Bush briefly discussed the rule: "There are fewer than 400 North Atlantic Right Whales left in the world… And there are going to be new regulations that will be coming to be shortly that require ships to slow down as they approach seaports where these whales are likely to be."

Bush's pronouncement comes after the rule was stuck inside his White House for 573 days. In that time, the White House Council of Economic Advisors and the Vice President's office attacked the science behind the rule in attempt to derail it. Although the rule has not yet been unveiled, early signs indicate it may be somewhat weaker than what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration originally proposed.

Had Bush been in the mood to be frank, his comment would have sounded more like this:

Scientists say if even one more right whale female dies, the entire species could be set on a path toward extinction. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has spent years developing a new policy to reduce the risk that ships will crash into and kill right whales.

The White House, under my leadership, fought hard to undermine that policy. I think the free market can save the whales. Whales don't deserve a bailout — they're not Wall Street execs. (Chuckle.) So we delayed, we interfered, we threw the kitchen sink at this rule to see if we couldn't turn it back. After a year-and-a-half, we've decided to let it through. See, I wanted to make sure this rule got finished under my watch, with a concession or two to industry, before some new guy comes in.