Regulatory Reform, OK--but the Meat Ax? : Shortsighted effort puts public health and safety at risk

The Senate this week is grappling with a regulatory issue that can make the eyes glaze over. But all Americans should be wide awake on this one, for it could affect their very lives every time they board an aircraft, eat a hamburger or swallow a pill and could alter the quality of air and water. Involved are bills that, to differing degrees, would curb the authority of federal officials to issue and enforce regulations. The measures would do so by compelling agencies to balance the social benefits of rules against the potential costs to business and the economy.

The basic notion of such cost-benefit analysis--as fuzzy as that science may be--is not bad. Business people have justifiably complained of regulations that are costly to comply with and bring scant benefit to the environment, public safety or health. Indeed, President Clinton two years ago ordered cost-benefit analyses and risk assessments for any new rule costing more than $100 million a year. But some in Congress want more. They are seeking to roll back decades of environmental progress by tying regulators up in costly red tape, litigation and delay.

ENORMOUS EXPENSE: A bill co-sponsored by Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) and Sen. J. Bennett Johnston (D-La.) is competing with a more moderate one by Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio) and Sen. John H. Chafee (R-R.I.). Both embrace the cost-benefit concept. But the Dole bill applies to rules costing $50 million a year, while the Glenn bill maintains the current, higher threshold of $100 million. The Dole bill also gives excessive petition rights to industry to attack existing rules that fail a cost-benefit test and automatically repeals any rule not given quick review by regulators. The Glenn bill gives more flexibility to agencies and limits possibilities for outside judicial review.

The White House estimates the Dole bill would cost $1.3 billion a year and require 4,500 new federal employees to implement. That may or may not be true, but it would certainly become a full-employment act for lawyers, inviting a flood of legal challenges to rules. And it would even require risk assessment before chemical companies had to tell the public about toxic emissions and probably would cause long delays in cleanup of toxic waste sites.

Both bills beg many questions. Who would do the cost-benefit analyses and required outside peer reviews? How would disagreements among experts be resolved? How would costs be balanced against intangible benefits, such as being able to see the Hollywood Hills or San Gabriel Mountains from the Los Angeles Basin?

DOLE BACKPEDALING: The Dole bill is so extreme that it probably cannot muster the votes needed to close a filibuster threatened by Democrats or override a probable veto by Clinton. Facing this, Dole has begun to compromise. The Senate Tuesday agreed both to raise the threshold to $100 million and state that the law should not be construed as overriding other health, safety and environmental laws. Major environmental organizations have given tacit support to the Glenn bill by not opposing it, and we give it not-so-tacit backing--if it can be amended to address the questions raised here. The big problem is that the House has passed a totally unacceptable version that imposes a $25-million threshold and other noxious conditions that are a real and present danger to American health and safety.

Conservatives have tapped into real public resentment over federal rules. But it will take only one incident in which E. coli bacteria poison scores of people or bad prescription drugs kill hundreds of old people or babies to create a fierce popular backlash against their reduce-government revolution. The Glenn bill has the potential to help solve the problem of burdensome regulation without axing important public safety protections.