Steinzor states that, as a society, we are neglecting our children's health to an extent that we would find unthinkable as individual parents, primarily due to the erosion of the government's role in protecting public health and the environment. At this pace, she asserts, our children will inherit a planet under grave threat. We can arrest these developments if a critical mass of Americans become convinced that these problems are urgent and the solutions are near at hand.

By focusing on three specific case studies—mercury contamination through the human food chain, perchlorate (rocket fuel) in drinking water, and the effects of ozone (smog) on children playing outdoors—Steinzor creates an analysis grounded in law, economics, and science to prove her assertions about the existing dysfunctional system.

Steinzor then recommends a concise and realistic series of reforms that could reverse these detrimental trends and serve as a blueprint for restoring effective governmental intervention. She argues that these recommendations offer enough material to guide government officials and advocacy groups toward prompt implementation, for the sake of America's—and the world's—future generations.

By the time Bush II left office on January 20, 2009, little had been done and a lot of important safeguards had been rolled back. Crucial rules mandated by Congress were delayed or derailed, and enforcement was a shadow of its former self.

The Obama Administration came to power promising to reinvigorate protections for public health, worker and consumer safety, and the environment; and, indeed, the Administration has made important progress on several fronts. But the President’s first term in office is more than half over, and too much remains to be done. To fulfill the promises he made to the American people, prevent further catastrophes, and save American industry from its own short-sighted opportunism, the President needs to exhort his Cabinet, his political appointees, and the White House staff to get crucial things done. This report identifies 12 such regulatory safeguards, a collection that in the view of the authors represents the 12 most critical environmental, health, and safety regulations still in the pipeline. Too many of them are in serious danger of being stuck in the pipeline long after January 20, 2013.

In particular, for nine of these 12 most critical rules, the Administration is currently on a trajectory that makes it possible, even likely, that it will not complete work on the regulation by the end of the President’s first term. Such an outcome would be particularly distressing because it would not be the consequence of congressional interference or other political opposition, but a flat out failure of the Administration to get its work done in a timely manner – a straightforward unforced error with potentially huge consequences.

The report says that three factors will play an outsized role in whether the Administration finishes in time: delays from the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, needlessly protracted deliberations by the agencies themselves, and pressure from anti-regulatory interests.

In August, the Center for Progressive Reform sent the Chesapeake Bay watershed jurisdictions (Delaware, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia) metrics by which our panel of water quality experts would judge the strength of the plans; we also submitted comments to the states in November on their draft plans. The states’ final plans were submitted to EPA in November and December.

The state plans fail to provide a specific roadmap for restoring the Bay, CPR says today in Missing the Mark in the Chesapeake Bay: A Report Card for the Phase I Watershed Implementation Plans (press release). The report was written by CPR Member Scholars William Andreen, Robert Glicksman, and Rena Steinzor, and CPR executive director Shana Jones and policy analyst Yee Huang.

Our report found that the state plans all underperformed, to varying degrees, on the two primary areas for evaluation: transparency of information and strength of program design. While improvements from the drafts, the final plans were light on providing specific commitments for actions needed to achieve the required pollution reductions, and generally did not pledge dedicated funding for the proposed programs. The plans generally did not establish a baseline for existing programs’ effectiveness to allow the public to monitor future performance in implementing the pollution reduction controls.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) eventually settled on policies for training workers and requiring appropriate safety gear. Their response undoubtedly helped limit the risks the workers faced. But the time it took to settle these policies put into sharp focus a significant problem in our nation’s emergency response policies: OSHA and NIOSH had only limited roles in the planning process and in the development of implementing regulations, a failing that badly slowed the government’s response on the worker-safety front. From this “original sin” flowed a number of negative consequences, some of which compromised the health and safety of cleanup workers.

• Too many workers in the Gulf were given inadequate training on the use of personal protective equipment. Employers and individual workers were thus left to determine on their own how to resolve the difficult question of what level of PPE was appropriate for their particular work environments. The most difficult issue was respirator use. A properly worn and properly functioning respirator puts additional stresses on the cardiovascular system, creating acute hazards that might be more dangerous than the long-term hazards of exposure to the air contaminants the respirator is designed to filter, particularly in the heat and humidity of the Gulf coast summer.

• Contractor and individual worker decisions about safety gear were complicated by an insufficient understanding of the chemical exposures faced by workers engaged in various tasks. No one knew the precise contents of the oil dispersants applied by BP because they were protected for several months as confidential business information under EPA’s liberal trade secrets policies. Moreover, toxicity testing required by the Oil Pollution Act only assessed ecological toxicity, not toxicity to human health.

• Air quality monitoring designed to characterize worker exposures was inconsistently summarized and published by BP and OSHA.

• BP’s medical recordkeeping following the explosion of Deepwater Horizon appeared to under report workers’ injuries and illnesses, in part because OSHA’s regulatory definitions enabled employers to avoid reporting certain health effects.

Significantly, OSHA and NIOSH also did a number of things well.

• OSHA quickly moved additional personnel to the region, thus enabling frequent site visits to address worker safety and health hazards.

• OSHA overcame an early and significant jurisdictional problem, extending through a Memorandum of Understanding with the federal on-scene coordinator the reach of its worker safety authority beyond the three nautical mile limit from the shoreline.

• OSHA and NIOSH developed a “matrix” of various tasks in which cleanup workers were engaged, a model that could be used to improve planning for future oil spills.

• NIOSH attempted to compile a roster of all workers involved in the cleanup so that it could more readily track health effects.

• NIOSH began a Health Hazard Evaluation and published interim reports of its work.

This report offers six specific recommendations:

• EPA and the Coast Guard should require Regional Response Teams and the oil industry to develop a matrix of likely or foreseeable cleanup tasks for each level of spill, from routine to worst case scenario, in consultation with NIOSH and OSHA. The cleanup task matrix should be the basis for planning task-specific levels of training, air quality monitoring and sampling protocols, and personal protection equipment (PPE) choices.

• EPA and the Coast Guard should include OSHA in the chain of command that approves Regional Contingency Plans and site-specific contingency plans in order to ensure that cleanup workers’ health and safety are properly addressed.

• EPA and the Coast Guard should require a NIOSH Health Hazard Evaluation for any spill that demands a significant number of cleanup workers or long-term cleanup efforts, paid by the company responsible for the oil spill.

• As they revise the National Contingency Plan, EPA and the Coast Guard should consult with volunteers, employees of oil spill response organizations, and occupational health specialists who have been involved in major disasters including the Valdez, Prestige, and Horizon spills.

• To ensure that adequate training and worker protection are provided, regulators should permanently adopt the provisions of the June 10 Memorandum of Understanding between OSHA and the federal on-scene coordinator that guarantee OSHA’s leadership is included in all consultations about the implementation of cleanup under the national and regional contingency plans.

• The White House should seek an emergency, supplemental appropriation for OSHA to support the substantial extra resources required to participate in this unprecedented response. Already operating on a shoestring budget, the failure to grant substantial additional resources to the agency will only endanger other workers for the sake of workers in the Gulf.

Unfortunately, IRIS is woefully incomplete. EPA is many years behind in meeting statutory mandates for completing profiles of at least 255 chemicals, and as a result regulatory and enforcement action related to those chemicals has been stalled. Some chemical profiles in IRIS are missing information essential to regulatory action. In addition, 77 of the hazardous air pollutants (HAPs) listed in IRIS are missing the most important piece of information – an assessment of how much of the substance may be safely inhaled. In all, some 109 chemical profiles that EPA was required by the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 to have completed by 2008 are either included in IRIS but missing critical elements, or entirely absent from the database. So severe is the delay in the IRIS process that a 2008 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report warned that the Bush Administration’s approach to IRIS, which resulted in just two completed profiles per year, left the database at risk of becoming obsolete.

To close data gaps and reestablish IRIS’s credibility as a cutting-edge database, EPA needs to make four changes. First, EPA should reduce the procedural burdens that were formalized during the Bush administration. Second, EPA must articulate clear, statute-driven priorities about which assessments to complete to ensure that data gaps in statutory mandates would be more quickly addressed. Third, the IRIS process must be restructured to allow for timely assessments made based on the weight-of-the-evidence at the time an assessment is undertaken. Fourth, EPA must also have adequate resources and make better use of its resources to complete a much larger number of assessments than it is currently finishing each year.

BP must shoulder its share of the blame, of course. Similarly, the Minerals Management Service (MMS) – since reorganized and rebranded – has come under much deserved criticism for its failure to rein in BP’s avaricious approach to drilling even where it was unable to respond to a worst-case scenario in a responsible and timely fashion. But the problems run much deeper than a single risk-taking company and a single dysfunctional regulatory agency.

This report sketches out widespread regulatory failure, touching several agencies of the federal government and affecting several critical environmental statutes. Prepared by Member Scholars of the Center for Progressive Reform (CPR), it has two goals: (1) to identify how and why the regulatory system failed to protect the public and environment and prevent the BP disaster, and (2) to recommend the priority reforms that are essential to correct these regulatory deficiencies.

The report begins by laying out the shortcomings in the primary statute under which deepwater oil drilling is regulated – the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA) – and outlines key reforms needed to provide the authority necessary to protect the public interest.

It then turns to systemic problems within the agency charged with regulation of deepwater oil drilling under the OCSLA – the Mineral Management Service (MMS), renamed the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE) in the wake of the disaster. These include problems of agency capture and inadequate funding.

The third topic addressed in the report is the role of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) – how and why this landmark statute was disabled from performing its critical role in the case of the BP well, and what regulatory changes can ensure that it functions effectively in the future.

The report next details the problems that surrounded the implementation and enforcement of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) as it applied to oil drilling and recommends several key reforms.

The report then discusses a systemic problem that is a theme in each prior section and that specific statutory reforms cannot fully remedy: obstacles to making sound regulatory decisions in the face of uncertain, low probability risks of potentially catastrophic or irreversible harm. This section highlights a common sense solution: adoption of a precautionary stance. A precautionary approach would replace the current widely-adopted presumption that regulation must await a high – and often unattainable – degree of certainty, even when the potential costs are irreversible or catastrophic.

In the last sections of the report, we step back to look at the regulatory system from a broader perspective. We consider first how the regulatory system and its failures in this case were caused in part by the absence of coherent policies on energy and climate change. Our current policy provides vast incentives for risky oil and gas development like deepwater drilling and few for low-carbon alternative energy sources. In the wake of yet another painful lesson on the cost of our current incoherent approach, it is time to focus political attention on the difficult but necessary task of debating and adopting a coherent and sound energy policy.

In the final section, we step back geographically to suggest why another lesson of this disaster is that the United States should undertake to learn more from the experience abroad, offering the example of the North Sea. Had we been paying closer attention, the investigations and reforms in the wake of the infamous Piper Alpha spill or the Bravo platform blowout might have offered insights to help us avoid this disaster.

This white paper explores the causes of OSHA’s regulatory dysfunctions and describes their negative impacts on OSHA and America’s workers. With the decreasing power of unions to organize and press employers to implement strong health and safety programs, employees in every occupation rely on OSHA to protect them from occupational hazards. Yet, in the last decade, OSHA has dropped more standards from its regulatory agenda than it has finalized, largely due to insufficient budget authority. And the agency’s enforcement program has assessed such paltry fines for even fatality-related violations of the law that many employers see no incentive in addressing hazards, much less developing precautionary health and safety programs.

After describing OSHA’s problems in detail, this paper outlines a number of reforms that could enhance the agency’s performance. Although certain aspects of the Occupational Safety and Health Act could use improvement, the recommendations in this paper focus on regulatory reform – that is, administrative actions that OSHA could implement in the short term. A subsequent white paper will address legislative reform.