Deregulation never sleeps

By The Associated Press - 11/04/2008

With most of the nation focused on a historic presidential campaign and election, Bush administration officials have been busy preparing parting gifts for their friends in private industry.

They're scrambling to rewrite scores of federal regulations. Among the goals: to allow power plants to emit more heat-trapping greenhouse gases, to cut back restrictions on mountaintop mining and undermine rules that protect millions of acres of public lands from energy development.

Other proposed rules changes would eliminate a requirement for environmental impact statements for some decisions on fishery management, relax a safety regulation on natural gas pipelines and allow increased emissions from oil refineries and chemical plants.

Even in cases in which the courts have told the administration to toughen existing regulations to make them consistent with the law — including a recent court-ordered decision to tighten standards on airborne lead — the administration keeps trying to find ways to reward its friends. Just before the lead rule was announced earlier this month, for example, the White House intervened to cut the number of industrial facilities that would have been monitored under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's original proposal.

Every administration makes last-minute changes to federal regulations on the way out the door. By most accounts, the Bush administration will fall short of the number made by its predecessor, the Clinton administration.

That's partly because Bush had the support of a Republican-dominated Congress for six of his eight years in office. He hasn't needed to rewrite federal rules in order to scuttle protective regulations.

Since taking office in 2001, Bush has dismantled the bipartisan federal regulatory framework that had been in place for decades. The result has been more dangerous workplaces, fewer consumer protections, pristine public lands opened to mining and drilling and financial carnage caused when banking rules that existed since the Great Depression were rolled back.

The deregulatory fervor continues. On Tuesday, the Bureau of Land Management was scheduled to announce a major sale of oil and gas leases involving large tracts of Western wilderness, the Salt Lake Tribune reported last week. The actual sale will take place on the Friday before Christmas, the newspaper reported.

Unfortunately, many of Bush's last-minute rules changes will be difficult and time-consuming to undo. New rules require lengthy comment periods and mandatory re-analysis. But that's no excuse for not trying to repair the damage.

Some of the administration's new rules, though, can and should be challenged in court. Others can be over- written by a new Congress determined to address problems such as global warming that have languished over the past eight years.

Americans should expect the administration and the Congress elected Tuesday to shape public policy based on the best interests of the American people, not the wish lists of politically connected lobbyists. That change can't start soon enough.

— The St. Louis Post-Dispatch