OpenMarket

Public policy analysts from 20 free-market organizations today filed a joint comment letter in support of EPA administrator Scott Pruitt’s proposal to repeal the Obama administration’s so-called Clean Power Plan.

Labor-management relation laws in the United States are in need of an update. Reform is long overdue, with the last major update to statutes governing union organizing and labor disputes occurred in 1940s. Current labor laws grant labor unions monopoly status and coercive power over workers. To that end, on April 26, the House Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions discussed legislative options to strengthen the rights of workers to choose whether or not to join a union and what is the proper legal status for worker centers.

Since any number with that many zeroes and commas in it is difficult for the human mind to process, let’s put it in a more digestible way.

After being attacked repeatedly for supposedly being soft on Wall Street and the “big banks,” Acting Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Mick Mulvaney was part of the Trump administration team that on Friday hit Wells Fargo with a fine of $1 billion. The CFPB levied this fine jointly the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” could be the motto of one of the key research programs at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency known as the Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS). EPA staff have been working for nearly a decade to improve the scientific process of this program, but have yet to get it right. 

The big news this week was the release of the 2018 edition of Ten Thousand Commandments. Agencies continued to provide fodder for next years edition with 49 proposed regulations and 61 final regulations last week, ranging from clam insurance to wireless signal boosters.

The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) this week held a panel discussion titled “What did they know, and when did they know it?” on the growing swirl of state and municipal lawsuits alleging that ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies knowingly hid climate change risk from the public. The litigants—cities and counties in California and Colorado—hope to score billions in climate change “damages.”

Boulder, Colorado and Boulder and San Miguel Counties filed suit in state court this week against ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy. The suit claims that petroleum products sold by the companies contribute to climate change and that leads to all sorts of bad things—such as droughts, wildfires, and severe storms—that affect tourism and agriculture in the city and two counties.   

One of the lessons learned from this year’s “10,000 Commandments” study is that Congress needs to be more involved in the regulatory process. It needs to make sure that agencies only regulate when legislation tells them to, and it needs to vet major new regulations. Over at USA Today, study author Wayne Crews and I make the case that Congress should also establish an annual regulatory budget.

We’ve been publishing and promoting the study for many years, and our strategies and methods have changed as the years have gone by. When we first started our video project in the mid-2000s, we made “10,000 Commandments” one of our first productions. In the video here from 2008, we review the burdens of the regulatory state with talent from the CEI staff and video shot right in our office. Back then YouTube itself was only a couple of years old, and many nonprofit organizations were jumping into the online video space for the very first time.