The White House circumvented EPA’s career staff to write almost half of the cost-benefit analysis for the agency’s proposal to stop regulating planet-warming emissions, according to emails and drafts from the rule’s interagency review.
The documents show that the White House Office of Management and Budget contributed 30 of the 63 pages that make up the draft rule’s slim, legally required regulatory impact analysis. The section — which proposes a new methodology for tallying regulatory benefits and costs — does not appear to have been written by EPA, but it’s unclear whether it was drafted at OMB, another office in the White House or even outside the federal government.
Former EPA officials and regulatory experts say that’s unusual.
“While it’s certainly not unprecedented for OMB or other White House offices to collaborate with an agency on developing an RIA or rule language, having political teams — or possibly even outside former political folk — impose an analytical methodology on an agency without the career team being on the same page is highly irregular,” said Jason Schwartz, legal director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University Law School.
