A former high-ranking official with the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and current Professor of Law at Georgetown University charged yesterday that Barack Obama's White House staff has effectively and illegally blocked several new environmental and safety regulations. The former offical, Lisa Heinzerling, described their actions as "legally suspect, politically unaccountable, [and] preternaturally secretive."
The charges may be of interest to residents of Bakersfield and the San Joaquin Valley who suffer with some of the worst air quality in the nation as well as those exposed to dangerous and unhealthy working conditions. Bakersfield and Kern County residents have been shocked and dismayed over the deaths in recent years at a local recycling facility in Lamont and a major oilfield near Taft.
In a blog post published on April 4, 2013, Heinzerling charged that the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) has refused to allow key pieces of environmental and safety regulations to be passed onto the President for his signature for several years. She based those charges on revelations in a recent book by the former "regulatory czar" of the Obama administration, Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein.
According to Heinzerling, Sunstein claimed in his book, “Simpler: The Future of Government,” that he was empowered to say no to members of the President's Cabinet, to put proposed rules onto a "shit list," to ensure that some rules never saw the light of day, and to require cost-benefit analyses be done when they weren't specifically required. The result of the latter was that agencies couldn't go forward if they could not pass OIRA's cost-benefit test, even in cases where such cost-benefit analyses are specifically prohibited by federal law, such as the federal Clean Air Act..
Heinzerling described the OIRA as an obscure, small office within the Office of Management and Budget that few people even know exists. She claimed that with the use of Executive Orders directing the OIRA actions, federal laws that specifically gave regulatory authority to specific agencies is being usurped by the OIRA. The results of these actions are that environmental and safety regulations developed by the very agencies who were designated by Congress to do so, have languished for years and never been signed into law.
Heinzerling was Senior Climate Policy Council to EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson from January July 2009 and Associate Administrator of the EPA Office of Policy from July 2009 to December 2010. She is also a member scholar and founding member of the Center for Progressive Reform.
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