YET ANOTHER INDUSTRY-SPONSORED "REGULATORY REFORM"
BILL GOES TO HOUSE VOTE MARCH 5TH !! EFFORT CONTINUES
TO GUT ALL FEDERAL HEALTH, SAFETY AND ENVIRONMENTAL
REGULATIONS. URGENT ACTION NEEDED.
Fisheries and Conservation News from the Pacific
Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations and the
Insititute for Fisheries Resources
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PLEASE REPOST TO YOUR NETWORKS
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Below is an urgent alert from a coalition of environmental,
labor, religious and health organizations regarding upcoming
"Regulatory Reform" legislation. Sorry for the last minute
notice; we just got the alert.
Attached is:
Alert explaining timing of this bill
Fact Sheet on HR 994
Fact Sheet on how HR 994 would impact Clean Water Act
Fact Sheet on how HR 994 would provide special interest loopholes
for factory farms
Fact Sheet on how HR 994 could allow DDT to be reintroduced to US
Sample letter to send to Reps. today!
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Citizens for Sensible Safeguards
GRASSROOTS ALERT
Another Reg "Reform" Bill is Being Pushed Through Congress
ACTION TO OPPOSE NEEDED IMMEDIATELY
This Tuesday, March 5th, the House will debate a bill known as
the Small Business Growth and Administrative Accountability Act
of 1996 (H.R. 994). It is expected that the Senate will take up
the same bill (or a similar one) shortly thereafter. In theory,
the bill is designed to relieve small business from burdensome
government regulations. In reality, the bill will stall the
enforcement of and, ultimately, eliminate safeguards that protect
our communities, our workers, and our environment.
The bill covers virtually every government regulation and gives a
small office within the Office of Management and Budget nearly
complete control over what agencies may do to carry out their
statutory mission to protect the public and the environment.
This office, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs
(OIRA), is the same office that worked in secret during the
Reagan and Bush years to run roughshod over agencies.
The bill also requires all major rules (within certain limits,
OIRA gets to decide what is "major") to sunset after a specified
amount of time. This means that agencies will need to spend a
significant amount of resources on conducting comprehensive
reviews roughly every seven years. If the agency doesn't finish
the review in time, they can be sued. The courts can require the
agency to complete the review by a specific time.
If the agency does not complete the review in the specified
amount of time, the court can require that the rule become
unenforceable. In effect creating a sunset and eliminating the
protection.
Anyone can petition OIRA to include any rule in the sunset review
process. Only under unusual circumstances can OIRA not approve
the petition.
This means that any controversial rule -- even those resolved by
courts -- will need to be reviewed again. In order to comply
with all the review requirements, the agency will have to begin
almost immediately. Whether you care about protections dealing
with the environment, workplace, civil rights, health care,
consumer issues, food safety, education, or virtually any other
aspect of government policy and programs -- you are affected by
this bill. The most onerous provisions are found in Title II of
the bill.
More bureaucracy, less public protections -- a prescription for
disaster -- that's what this bill is about.
CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVE WITH THIS MESSAGE:
Support the Motion to Strike Title II of H.R. 994!
If that fails, oppose H.R. 994.
H.R. 994 will undermine federal protections and create more
bureaucracy
For More Info.: Jeff Thomas, OMB Watch, (202) 234-8494 or
thomasje at rtk.net
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Sample fact sheet
H. R. 994 Hijacking Public Protections
The Hyde-Clinger Substitute to HR 994 would devastate Americans
health and rob their pocketbooks. It would turn agencies into an
arm of special interests seeking to weaken and repeal key
safeguards that have improved and protected the safety of our
food supply and drinking water and enhanced the quality of our
environment over the last 25 years.
Under Title II of the bill, all of these public protections would
have to be repealed or weakened at industry s behest unless the
agency could prove that the existing safeguard passed extreme new
tests aimed at minimizing industry compliance costs rather than
protecting the public. Under Title III of the bill Congress
could use super-fast-track procedures to repeal these same
safeguards even though the agency found they should be continued
after a lengthy public review process.
Unlimited Special Interest Opportunities to Repeal Safeguards
The bill would prevent agencies from enforcing existing
safeguards by forcing them instead to spend taxpayers dollars on
reviewing special interest petitions seeking to have rules
relaxed or repealed. Section 204 of the bill allows special
interests to file unlimited petitions to repeal or weaken
safeguards. The bill does not allow the agencies charged with
health and environmental protection to decide whether to accept
or deny such review petitions. Instead the Office of
Management and Budget (OMB) is given total power to decide how
many petitions agencies must review. (In some prior
administrations OMB has been used as a tool for special interests
to kill off proposals disliked by industry.) The bill would
expand OMB s power to unprecedented scope, allowing it to end
current safeguards in waves of exterminations.
Wasteful and Damaging Reviews of all Major Rules
Section 206 of the bill requires all major safeguards to go
through an expensive time-consuming rulemaking process simply to
stay in effect. This requirement applies to all such safeguards,
no matter how successful and necessary they are and regardless of
how well they are working. Thus, the government would have to
spend millions of dollars and years of public employees time
reviewing whether the rule against poisonous lead in gasoline
should be retained. If the review is not completed by the bill s
unreasonable deadlines, a court could order the rule suspended
under section 211 of the bill. The result would be that foreign
refiners could flood the US with harmful lead-containing
gasoline, poisoning Americans and putting domestic refiners at a
competitive disadvantage.
Paralysis by analysis and a hidden Supermandate to attack all
existing safeguards
The bill would require agencies to undertake time-consuming
regulatory analyses of all existing major rules and all other
rules for which petitions are filed. This unreasonable
requirement is accomplished by a back-door drafting trick.
Section 207 of the bill now forces the agency to specifically
solicit public comment on all of the regulatory analysis issues
that were previously in a separate title of earlier versions of
the bill. When industry submits its comments on these issues in
the rulemaking process, the agency will then be forced to
undertake lengthy analyses to review and correct the special-
interest claims. If the agency fails to do so, courts could
overturn existing safeguards. In effect the bill creates a
stealth supermandate provision that would weaken the commands
of laws like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act to protect
health and the environment.
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Fact sheet on HR 994 and Clean Water
H.R. 994 WILL MEAN DIRTIER WATER IN OUR LAKES AND RIVERS
Under the Clean Water Act, EPA issues industry-specific rules
that force factories to reduce and eliminate the discharge of
polluted wastewaters to the nations lakes and rivers. These
rules, called "effluent guidelines," are credited with doubling
over the past twenty years the number of the nation's waters
where we can safely fish and swim.
Unfortunately, however, the effluent guidelines and the
improvement they have achieved in the nation's water quality, are
placed at risk by the provisions of H.R. 994 that allow industry
to target, and potentially eliminate, environmental safeguards.
One of the most important water pollution control rules, and
therefore one of the most obvious industry targets, is the 1987
rule that covers the roughly 1000 chemical plants that produce
organic chemicals, plastics, and synthetic fibers.
If the Chemical Manufacturing Association or one of its members
were to challenge this rule, and succeed in securing a court
order to suspend its enforcement, these facilities would be
allowed to discharge up to 100 million pounds per year of solids
and organic matter, and 24 million pounds per year of toxics.
Similarly at risk are the crucially important rules that require
municipalities to fully treat sewage before releasing it into the
nation's waterways. Municipalities have recently complained
about sewage treatment as an unfunded mandate and some would
likely petition for a repeal of this vital rule.
The accumulation of sewage and pollution resulting from
suspension of these rules would lead to rapid deterioration of
water quality in the Great Lakes, the Chesapeake Bay, Puget
Sound, Long Island Sound, and in lakes and streams across the
nation.
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Fact Sheet on HR 994 and Factory Farms
H.R. 994 WILL GUT PROTECTION AGAINST MANURE SPILLS FROM
FACTORY FARMS
During the summer of 1995, millions of gallons of manure and
urine from factory farms in North Carolina poured into nearby
rivers, killing thousands of fish in the process. Unfortunately,
as factory farms have continued to proliferate, such spills have
become increasingly common. In just the past 6 months, there
have been large manure and urine spills in Iowa, Minnesota, and
Missouri resulting in massive fish kills and threats to water
quality.
At present, spills such as these are violations of the Clean
Water Act. Not surprisingly, the environmental community and
concerned neighbors in rural America are seeking to strengthen
Clean Water Act protections against such manure spills. However,
under H.R. 994 the release of manure from factory farms into
American waters could become the routine, rather than the
exception.
Since 1972, the Clean Water Act has included factory farms in the
category of industries known as "point sources." Large farms
have been required to secure permits for any discharges into U.S.
waters. Agribusiness has repeatedly sought exceptions from Clean
Water Act requirements, and in fact secured provisions to achieve
this unfortunate objective in H.R. 961, Clean Water Act
Amendments that passed the House of Representatives last spring.
However, if H.R. 994 were enacted, factory farms might no longer
need changes to the Clean Water Act to achieve their end.
Under title II of H.R. 994, factory farms would be empowered to
petition for the review and rollback of the vitally important
rules that bar the unlimited discharge into rivers and lakes of
manure and urine from factory farms. As a result many of the
lakes and rivers in rural America could become little more than
open sewers for the sole use of corporate agriculture.
Recreational uses, commercial fishing, and drinking water safety
would all suffer dramatically, as they have in past instances
when waste from factory farms was released into waterways.
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Fact Sheet on HR 994 and DDT
BRINGING BACK DDT
One of the most important and successful environmental programs
ever was the phase-out of DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane)
and related pesticides in 1972 under the Federal Insecticide,
Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA). Although we now have
documentation of serious human health effects from these
pesticides, the major motivation for the phase-out in 1972 was
scientific information indicating that DDT was leading to a
thinning of egg shells in important bird species and impairing
their reproduction. The problem was so severe that a number of
species, including the bald eagle, were threatened with
extinction.
One of the scientists who had undertaken this research, Rachel
Carson, described the threat in her landmark book, Silent Spring,
which awakened America to the threat of DDT and the importance of
environmental protection generally. The successful effort to ban
DDT was powered largely by the public reaction to this book.
Although controversial at the time, the DDT phase-out has proven
extremely successful. Scientists have documented a dramatic
improvement in egg shell thickness in numerous bird species,
including the bald eagle and the peregrine falcon. These species
began to reproduce more successfully, populations began to
increase again and, the bald eagle has recently been formally
removed from the list of endangered species.
It is a testament to the extreme character of H.R. 994 that title
II of the bill would empower pesticide manufacturers -- who still
sell DDT in other nations -- to petition to have DDT brought back
to the American market, and of course the American environment.
Sponsors of the legislation may assert that this is not an
intended consequence of H.R. 994. While, it is hoped that this
is the case, it is noteworthy that House Majority Whip Tom Delay
(R. Tx.) has publicly called for bringing back DDT to the
American market.
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Below is a sample letter. Please send a similar letter
to your House Member today! For their fax numbers or email
addresses, call CWN at 202-624-9357 or 9358. If you can't send a
letter, just call them.
Sample letter:
SAMPLE LETTER TO THE HOUSE
Fax or E-MAIL DIRECTLY TO Your REP. on Monday if possible
DATE
Dear Representative _______,
NAME OF ORGANIZATION is greatly concerned that the House of
Representatives may repeat a mistake it made last March in
pushing so called "Regulatory Reform" legislation. Reps. Henry
Hyde (R-IL) and William Clinger (R-PA) have offered a substitute
to H.R. 994 that is deceptively titled the Small Business Growth
and Administrative Accountability Act; it will be on the House
floor as early as this Tuesday, March 5. This bill, like the
Dole-Johnston bill which was appropriately stalled on the Senate
floor last summer, places costs to industry and the regulated
community above human health and safety.
H.R. 994 is the latest attempt to sideswipe health,
environmental and safety protections. This bill would erase the
basic day-to-day standards that every American takes for granted.
These include regulations that affect airbag safety, commercial
truck guidelines, and train and plane safety. In light of the
recent Amtrak and commuter train accident in which 11 people
died, H.R.994 and its gutting of transportation safety is a
horrendous example of Congress disregarding the public's
concerns.
H.R. 994 is a slam against a host of other safeguards. H.R.
994 is an attack on guidelines that protect the weak and sick
from e-coli in food and from water-borne cryptosporidium.
Provisions in the bill could decimate the economy of communities
that depend on small fisheries; delay the storage and disposal of
nuclear waste; and render natural resource protections like the
Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act
ineffective. It could affect everything from worker safety to
civil rights, from education for those with disabilities to
protecting blood supplies.
Most of the worst provisions in H.R. 994 are in Title II.
If enacted, Title II would have a grave impact on health, safety
and environmental protections. It would require agencies to
review all major rules and allow the Office of Management and
Budget to force review of all other rules. The agency that has
the expertise regarding the regulation in review would not have
any say -- the purse strings would. The bill would allow courts
to "sunset" all rules that are not reviewed within a fixed review
period.
Moreover, H.R. 994 is not a serious attempt to make
government more efficient and responsive to the public. It is
nothing more than a special interest fix for the corporations and
industries crying for a sweetheart deal. The bill exempts
regulations that benefit industry -- typifying the special fixes
that are included this legislation. Taxpayers' dollars would be
wasted as valuable agency resources respond to frivolous
petitions and redundant review.
As H.R. 994 moves to the floor, consider the extensive
polling that demonstrates that Americans see the attacks against
health, environmental and safety regulations as a cynical bow to
serve industries' special interests. Americans now more than
ever want guarantees that the trains and planes they ride are
safe; the food and water they drink is pure; and the stretches of
America's beautiful wilderness will be preserved for future
generations.
Please vote to strike Title II of H.R. 994. But if Title II
is not repealed, we urge you in the strongest terms to vote
against H.R. 994.
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