OMB
egrossman | November 19, 2014Often unwatched by all but policy-wonks yet key to determining policies put forth by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), are the EPA’s Scientific Advisory Boards. These boards consult with the EPA on the science that influences regulations, particularly on individual chemicals – science that’s used to protect the public from chemical hazards. On Tuesday the House passed a bill, the EPA Science Advisory Board Reform Act of 2013 or H.R. 1422, that would change how the EPA selects Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) members. The White House, in a statement from the Office of Management and…
cmonforton | November 18, 2013This week will mark the 90-day point of the Labor Department submitting for White House review one of its top priority regulations to protect coal miners' health. It's a rule to prevent black lung disease. The director of the office that conducts those reviews, Howard Shelanski, promised earlier this year during his confirmation hearing that timely review of agencies' regulations would be a top priority. Mr. Shelanski said:
“I absolutely share the concern you just raised about timeliness. ...I recognized that EO 12866 establishes the initial 90 day review process, and it would be one of my…
cmonforton | October 17, 2013Roger R. King, 62, in West Virginia. Robert Smith, 47, in Illinois. Mark Christopher Stassinos, 44, in Wyoming. Larry Schwartz, 59, in Indiana.
Four coal miners, working in four different States, employed by four different mining companies, all fatally injured on the job during the first eleven days of the government shutdown. King was employed at CONSOL's McElroy mine, Smith at Alliance Resources' Pattiki mine, Stassinos at PacifiCorp's Bridger mine, and Schwartz at Five Star Mining's Prosperity Mine.
I didn’t learn of these deaths from anything posted on the Mine Safety and Health…
cmonforton | September 3, 2013As Liz Borkowski noted yesterday, we are following up on a tradition that we started last year to mark Labor Day. We released our second annual review of U.S. occupational health and safety for Labor Day 2013.
Liz explained in her post our objectives in preparing the report. She also highlighted its first section which profiles some of the best research from the year published in both peer-reviewed journals and by non-profit organizations. Here’s a peek at section two of the report on activities at the federal level:
Sequestration and other budget cuts have affected our worker protection…
cmonforton | August 28, 2013President Obama's regulatory czar, Howard Shelanski, has been on the job for a month. During his confirmation hearing Shelanski expressed his commitment to transparency. He suggested it was one of his key priorities within the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) which is housed within the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). As noted, however, by CPR scholar Sidney Shapiro and his colleague James Goodwin, OIRA has a long history of secrecy with respect to its role in the centralized review of agencies' regulatory activities. Many in the open-government…
cmonforton | August 23, 2013After more than 900 days of "review" by the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), OSHA announced it was publishing a proposed rule to protect workers who are exposed to respirable crystalline silica. It's a workplace hazard that causes the irreversible and progressive lung disease silicosis, and is also associated with lung cancer, autoimmune disorders and kidney disease. About 2.2 million workers are exposed to the fine dust in their jobs, many of which are employed in the construction industry. I've been writing here for about two years on the need for a…
cmonforton | June 12, 2013Themes related to time---meeting deadlines, doing retrospective reviews----were heard frequently today by President Obama's nominee to direct his Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). Howard Shelanski, JD, PhD, the President's choice for his "regulatory czar" post, appeared for his confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs.
The nominee's written statement was short on details about his vision for OIRA, but in response to a question from Committee Chairman Tom Carper (D-DE), he mentioned three specific priorities:
"Should…
cmonforton | March 20, 2013A funny thing happened when representatives of U.S. foundries met on March 12 with White House officials to complain about a not-yet-proposed worker safety regulation. The industry group seemed to forget that the targets of their complaints are contained in their own best practices publication.
The American Foundry Society (AFS) requested the meeting with the Office of Management and Budget's (OMB) Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) to discuss a draft proposed rule by the Labor Department's OSHA to protect workers exposed to respirable crystalline silica. AFS argued that…
lborkowski | December 24, 2012While we’re on vacation, we’re re-posting content from earlier in the year. This post was originally published on April 12, 2012. The silica rule still has not come out.
By Celeste Monforton
More than 425 days—-that’s 14 months—-have passed since the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) sent to the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) a draft proposed regulation designed to protect workers who are exposed to respirable crystalline silica. The hazard is one of the oldest known causes of work-related lung disease, yet OSHA does not…
cmonforton | November 20, 2012
Shortly after taking office, the head of the Labor Department's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) acknowledged the troubling slow pace at which new worker safety regulations are put in place. In a February 2010 speech, David Michaels, PhD, MPH said:
"Some standards have taken more than a decade to establish, and that's not an acceptable response when workers are in danger."
In a March 2010 speech the OSHA chief added:
"Clearly the current system for issuing standards doesn't work well for those it's supposed to benefit - workers. When rulemaking takes years and even…
cmonforton | September 12, 2012A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the number of major regulatory actions taken by OSHA during the Presidential election years 1984 to 2012. I was exploring the popular notion that OSHA's regulatory activities always slow down during a Presidential election year. I learned that the number of final rules, proposed rules, and advanced notices of proposed rules issued by OSHA slowed substantially over the last 28 years, but I needed more data to discern whether the number of these actions actually slowed during Presidential election years. The chart below provides that data.
In five of the…
cmonforton | August 28, 2012I'll be the first to admit I've criticized the Obama Administration's OSHA for failing to issue or even propose many new worker safety and health standards. As I wrote earlier this month, under President Obama and Secretary Solis, OSHA has only issued three new worker safety rules, two of which were safety standards affecting discrete industries and the third, a rule broadly endorsed by big business. Some colleagues and commentators attribute this mediocre record to regulatory resistance in the White House, pressure from Republicans on Capitol Hill, too few staff in the OSHA standards…
cmonforton | August 14, 2012In a New York Times story reporting on the resignation of Cass Sunstein, President Obama's director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), the paper missed an opportunity to take readers beyond the rhetoric to reality. One sentence in the article said this:
"Business lobbies and Republicans in Congress complain frequently about 'job-killing' regulations, citing rules like the E.P.A.’s new standard for carbon emissions from power plants (recently upheld by a federal appeals court) and the Department of Labor’s new worker-safety rules."
"What Department of Labor's new…
cmonforton | May 1, 2012Earlier this month, the U.S. Government Accountability Office issued a report on the snail's pace of the OSHA process of issuing new rules to protect workers from health and safety hazards on-the-job. One telling table in the document showed the agency issued about 20 new major regulations in each of the previous two decades (i.e., 24 in the 1980's and 23 in the 1990's), but during the 2000's, OSHA only issued 10 final rules. Although some of these regulations only affected a fraction of all U.S. businesses because the hazards are industry-specific (e.g., servicing of rim wheels, grain…
cmonforton | April 12, 2012More than 425 days----that's 14 months----have passed since the Labor Department's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) sent to the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) a draft proposed regulation designed to protect workers who are exposed to respirable crystalline silica. The hazard is one of the oldest known causes of work-related lung disease, yet OSHA does not have a comprehensive, protective standard on the books to address it. In the last few decades, epidemiological studies have also found a strong association between silica exposure and…
cmonforton | March 12, 2012Making a $10,000 bet, insulting people for wearing plastic rain ponchos, and asserting that $374,000 is not much to earn in speaking fees are just a few examples of Mitt Romney being out of touch. The Republican Presidential hopeful doesn't seem to have a clue either about how federal agencies like EPA and OSHA conduct their work. On Romney's website, his issue brief on "Regulations" says:"A look across the landscape shows that federal agencies today have near plenary power to issue whatever regulations they see fit. Though most are nominally controlled by the president, in actual…
lborkowski | February 1, 2012Celeste wrote last week about the letter from scientists and public health experts urging President Obama to direct the Office of Management and Budget to finish reviewing the Department of Labor's proposed health standard on crystalline silica. Respirable crystalline silica has been known for several centuries as an occupational hazard -- it can cause irreversible fibrotic lung disease and is also associated with lung cancer. An estimated 1.7 million US workers are exposed to this hazard, and could benefit from the rule. But OMB has been reviewing the rule for more than 11 months.
The…
cmonforton | January 25, 2012A group of 300 scientists, physicians and public health experts are urging President Obama to direct his Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to complete its review of a proposed Labor Department health standard on the carcinogen crystallline silica. OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) has been reviewing the proposed rule for nearly a year, although the Executive Order (EO) giving OIRA authority for such review sets a four-month maximum time limit.
The signatories on the letter to President Obama, many of whom are members of the Union of Concerned Scientists or the…
cmonforton | January 5, 2012A federal advisory committee is urging HHS Secretary Sebelius and Labor Secretary Solis to proceed expeditiously with new worker safety regulations. In letters sent recently to these Cabinet-level officials, the National Advisory Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, (NACOSH) the committee used phrases such as "deeply distressed," and "concerned and disappointed," to characterize the Obama Administration's stalled efforts to advance new worker health and safety regulations.
NACOSH was established by Congress in 1970 as part of the law that created federal OSHA. The 12-person…
cmonforton | January 3, 2012When an organization fails to get the little things right, I have difficulty believing they are competent to get the big things right either. That's the way I feel about the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA).
OIRA is part of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), was created by the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980, and is charged with reviewing certain proposed federal regulations and approving agencies' requests to collect data from the public. One of OIRA's responsibilities, as outlined in the 1993 Executive Order (EO) 12866, is coordinating the…