EPA planning $104.5 billion hit to the economy

Can't Get No Respect

Even the White House isn't green enough for its green regulators.

WSJ.COM 5/8/12

President Obama's regulatory agenda rarely inspires sympathy, but it does have its lighter moments when you have to feel sorry for the guy: No matter how much running room he gives to his crowd at the Environmental Protection Agency, they can never be happy. Read on for the story of the $1 billion rules, the leaked emails and the green bureaucrats who can't keep the White House on message.

It all started in August 2010, when Speaker John Boehner sent Mr. Obama a letter noting that "major rules" are usually defined as costing the private economy more than $100 million annually—but the Administration had been cooking up regulations that cost 10 times more. Maybe he could get a list of the $1 billion-plus rules on the drawing board?

It took another year, and another request from Mr. Boehner, for the White House to respond with a pro forma, 19-sentence letter: "I agree that it is extremely important to minimize regulatory burdens and to avoid unjustified regulatory costs . . ."

We'll spare you the rest of the boilerplate, though an appendix did list seven rules breaking the $1 billion barrier, four of them from EPA. The total cost for EPA hit $104.5 billion, versus $5 billion for the entire rest of the government.

Acknowledging this reality in print was apparently too much for the EPA, which prefers to hide its damage in the arcana of the Federal Register. According to emails obtained by an outfit called the Center for Progressive Reform, the White House hadn't given the agency a "heads up on this letter." Red alert!

Dan Kanninen, then the EPA's White House liaison, called up to complain. "First," as he later described his dressing-down, "we've spent a great deal of time and energy framing these rules with the public health and environmental benefits, and when and how they are driven by statutory, scientific and legal obligations, which this letter and appendix do not."

In other words, the White House forgot to include the EPA's political agitprop when answering a simple query from Congress. Come to think of it, that is a fairly significant oversight for the Chicago crew.

Related: the suppressed internal EPA document showing no endangerment risk from man-made CO2