The US Congress is back in session, and it seems they , too. The new Republican-led House of Representatives votes this week on two bills that would effectively toss out evidence-based reasoning from the process of deciding which regulations to enforce. If passed, the bills could undermine everything from rules about clean water to the Endangered Species Act.
鈥淚t鈥檚 replacing a science-based process with a political process,鈥� says , director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned 快猫短视频s in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Supporters of the bills are talking about cutting through bureaucracy and increasing transparency, but the provisions could effectively give Congress licence to shut down or ignore research around regulations.
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In the US, before a regulatory agency can write regulations, it must first analyse the problem and figure out several plausible ways to address it. These must meet scientific standards like peer review.
This kind of substantial scientific analysis underpins all the basic public health and safety protections including clean air, clean water, clean drinking water, and environmental protections. 鈥淲hat Congress is saying is, OK, that鈥檚 all well and good, but we don鈥檛 have to care about any of that 鈥� we鈥檙e just going to vote on whether we like it,鈥� says Rosenberg. 鈥淭his diminishes the role of science in our public policy process.鈥�
First bill passed
The House has already passed the first bill, , although it must still clear the Senate to become law. Called the of 2017, it would let Congress overturn all regulations finalised in the last 60 legislative days of the Obama administration with a single vote 鈥� effectively turning the president鈥檚 four-year term into a three-and-a-half-year term.
That鈥檚 because the past 60 legislative days take us all the way back to 17 May 2016. All the 鈥� about 200 of them 鈥� will be on the chopping block, including regulations on how to decide who can have access to , rules about the safety and effectiveness of antibacterial soaps, and standards limiting like office furniture. A host of other energy and public health-related measures, including ones to limit sex discrimination, are similarly at risk.
A similar law already exists that puts many of the Obama administration鈥檚 final works in jeopardy: the Congressional Review Act allows law-makers to vote on late-breaking regulations one by one. What鈥檚 dangerous about the Midnight Rules is that instead of being forced to vote on them one by one, this act could bury them all in a mass grave.
The second bill forms a perfect complement to Midnight Rules. The Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny, or , says that all regulations that will cost more than $100 million will have to go through a vote in both chambers of Congress within days of being proposed before they can be enacted.
Echoing the rationale for the Midnight Rules act, its stated purpose is to 鈥渋ncrease accountability for and transparency in the Federal regulatory process鈥�. But in practice, it could mean that years of painstaking research that go into writing regulations can simply be ditched, replaced with simple political whims.
The bill would have obvious downsides for any issue on which industry and regulators have opposing priorities, like environmental protection or workplace safety. If the oil industry, for example, is worried that certain emissions regulations will harm its bottom line, it can get Congress to annul them with a simple vote 鈥� or just delay long enough for the 60-day window to close.
The House is expected to vote on REINS by the end of this week. A version of the act has been passed for the past 10 years, but has never made it through the Senate. In the past, though, there has also been the threat of a presidential veto. Donald Trump has indicated that he will offer no such resistance.
However the vote goes, the fact that Congress seems eager to strip science out of the rule-making process is part of a larger trend: replacing scientific expertise with the vagaries of politics.
