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Friday, October 28, 2005

One More Thing About Davis-Bacon
One more thing about the White House's decision to rescind the waiver of Davis-Bacon Act prevailing wage requirements, per CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight:

The reinstatement will not change the wages of those already working under contract. So far, the federal government has awarded $50 million in relief contracts. But it should make the contracting process from here on out more transparent and ensure displaced workers are first in line to rebuild their communities.

So there is $50 million in taxpayer money going to contractors who will continue to be allowed to pay less than the prevailing wage for construction and construction-related work.

Posted by Robert Shull, 06:04:23 PM

Hard Labor After Katrina
Times apparently aren't good for workers in the post-Katrina aftermath. Most notably, of course, the White House waived Davis-Bacon Act prevailing wage requirements for contractors, until the political pressure became too much to bear. Almost immediately after the hurricane hit, the Bush administration also announced a slew of waivers of regulatory protections, including waiver of the already atrocious rules for the maximum number of hours trucking companies can force their drivers to work without rest. (That waiver has now expired.)

Earlier this month, National Public Radio reported that thousands "of Latino workers, both documented and undocumented, fled the U.S. Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Now there are reports of discrimination by law enforcement officials, harassing suspected illegal immigrants at a Red Cross shelter in Long Beach, Miss. Contractors are also suspected of bringing undocumented workers into disaster areas for rebuilding projects, and dumping them at shelters as a form of subsidized housing."

Just last week came word that some "contractors leading reconstruction projects in the hurricane-hit southern United States have badly exploited workers and taken away business from local firms."

Cash alone won't rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast; it will take the labor of American workers. Something's going terribly wrong if there are this many reports of failures to protect those workers.

Posted by Robert Shull, 04:19:28 PM

Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Mismanagement Failing to Keep America Safe
The dramatic (and heavily covered) speech by former State Dept. Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson is most noted for its reference to a White House "cabal" that drove America into war with Iraq, but it's worth noting that Wilkerson's speech addressed a fundamental problem of mismanaging government that has not just international but also domestic policy consequences:

Generally with regard to domestic crises like Katrina, Rita -- and I could go on back -- we haven't done very well on anything like that in a long time. And if something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence. . . . Read in there what they say about the necessity of the people to throw off tyranny or to throw off ineptitude or to throw off that which is not doing what the people want it to do. And you're talking about the potential for, I think, real dangerous times if we don't get our act together.

Underlying it all, according to Wilkerson, is a failure to engage the bureaucracy: "When you cut the bureaucracy out of your decisions and then foist your decisions, more or less out of the blue, on that bureaucracy, you can't expect that bureacuracy to carry out your decision out very well. And furthermore, if you're not prepared to stop the feuding elements in that bureaucracy as they carry out your decision, you're courting disaster."

The Bush administration's answer to the problem of a resistant bureaucracy appears to have been cronyism: installing people who are loyal to the administration, especially to its anti-regulatory, pro-corporate agenda, at the head of every agency and program in order to shove that agenda through as firmly as possible. Adbusters asks about the consequences of this approach: "in a crunch, just how many of Bush’s appointments can actually be trusted to do these jobs, both competently and with impartiality?"

When "truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic" happens, we'll find out the hard way.

Posted by Robert Shull, 06:37:54 PM

Thursday, October 20, 2005

NSR: A Second Bite at the Apple
With slim chances of passing in Congress, a controversial change to the designation of new source review is now snaking its way through the regulatory system. The regulation would allow power plants to make modifications to existing equipment without installing new pollution technology if their hourly emissions rates do not increase. By changing the way power plant emissions are calculated from an annual output to an hourly output, plants would be allowed to pollute more per year by operating for longer hours. From the New Standard:

"This latest attack by the Bush administration to dismantle [New Source Review] comes from a new angle," the Sierra Club’s Nat Mund explained in a statement Friday. "Simply put, a power utility could refurbish a plant so that it does not release more pollution per hour, but could double the operating time thus releasing more pollution over the course of the year. . . ."
"This is the Clean Air Act we're talking about, not the Hourly Efficiency Act," [National Environmental Trust Vice President John] Stanton said in a statement. "A plant can be more efficient, and yet a bigger polluter if it runs for more hours. That means more soot and smog pollution, more asthma attacks, and more deaths."
Earlier this year, a federal court rebuffed states seeking more stringent enforcement of New Source Review. The ruling also required the EPA to clarify its New Source Review-related rule making, leading EPA administrator Stephen L. Johnson to propose the new rules, the agency said in announcing the changes.
In August, the Natural Resources Defense Council obtained and leaked an internal EPA document warning that the rule now being proposed could seriously undermine agency enforcement actions across the country, the Washington Post reported.
House leaders dropped a nearly identical measure from the recently passed Gasoline for America’s Security Act.

The case is an example of the way industry interests abuse the regulatory process in order to get a second bite at the apple, taking controversial policies they cannot win in Congress and sneaking them into agency regulations. The proposed rule was published today in the Federal Register and will be open for public comment through Dec. 19.

Posted by Genevieve Smith, 12:11:30 PM

Monday, October 17, 2005

Gone With the Wind
John Graham, administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the White House Office of Management and Budget, will be leaving that post to become dean of the RAND Graduate School, effective March 1.

Perhaps he will teach his students to do a better job in public policy than he did at OIRA. “John Graham comes to RAND with an outstanding track record," RAND insists, but his legacy at the White House is a brutal one for the public:

And that's just a fraction of the damage.

Posted by Robert Shull, 06:19:22 PM

Tuesday, October 04, 2005

OIRA Meetings on HexChrome, Dry-Cleaning Rules
OIRA met with chemical industry representatives on Sept. 26 to discuss "the economic effects on co-residential dry cleaning facilities of proposed EPA regulations under consideration." The rulemaking in question is presumably the forthcoming proposed NESHAP rule for perchloroethylene dry cleaning facilities residual risk standards.

OIRA also met on Oct. 3 to discuss OSHA's rulemaking on occupational exposure to hexavalent chromium with SBA's Office of Advocacy, representatives of the metal finishing, aerospace and steel industries as well as Lockheed Martin and Boeing.

Posted by Genevieve Smith, 09:58:47 AM

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