Fire Hydrant of Freedom
Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Politics & Religion => Topic started by: Crafty_Dog on August 18, 2011, 07:25:57 AM
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SEC destroyed files?
http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/mikeshedlock/2011/08/18/sec_destroys_9000_fraud_files
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The Federal Trade Commission is ready to formally declare war against Google, reports the Wall Street Journal:
WASHINGTON—The Federal Trade Commission is poised to serve Google Inc. with civil subpoenas, according to people familiar with the matter, signaling the start of a wide-ranging, formal investigation into whether the Internet-search giant has abused its dominance on the Web.
The agency’s five-member panel of commissioners is preparing to send its formal demands for information to Google within days, these people said. They said other companies are likely to receive official requests for information about their dealings with Google at a later stage.
Representatives for Google and the FTC declined to comment.
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The [FTC's] inquiry…will examine fundamental issues relating to Google’s core search-advertising business, said people familiar with the matter. The business is the source of most of Google’s revenue. The issues include whether Google—which accounts for around two-thirds of Internet searches in the U.S. and more abroad—unfairly channels users to its own growing network of services at the expense of rival providers.
In November, the European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, opened its own formal investigation into allegations by several companies that Google had violated European competition laws. Google denies the allegations.
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a friend comments:
A key player in the FTC’s investigation will be the Bureau of Economics antitrust unit — which is now headed by a British government official with extensive ties to European Union authorities. I suspected something was up yesterday, but now I think it’s clear: Jon Leibowitz brought in a foreign economist to help oversee the Google investigation because he couldn’t trust any American economist to validate his insane obsession with destroying one of America’s most successful companies.
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Among the core assumptions of modern liberalism is that future regulations have no more effect on the economy than future taxes, as if expectations don't matter and businesses don't prepare now for their costs tomorrow. President Obama's letter to John Boehner yesterday is a classic of the genre.
Last week the Speaker asked the White House to disclose any federal rules in the works with economic costs of $1 billion or more. Proposed or final rule-makings are defined as "major" when their estimated annual costs exceed $100 million. The Obama regulatory agenda for 2011 contains 219 such items. Last year, that figure was 191, versus the combined total for the first two years of the Bush Administration of 103. Amid this surge, Mr. Boehner's underlying point was that the regulatory ambitions of the Obamanauts are redefining "major," much in the way trillion is the new billion for government spending.
Mr. Obama responded by identifying seven pending major rules topping $1 billion, like the Department of Transportation's federal motor vehicle safety standard No. 111 for rearview mirrors ($3 billion) and the Environmental Protection Agency's ozone regulations (as much as $90 billion). But even that understates the costs, as Mr. Obama explains at length. The regulatory agenda is "merely a list of rules that are under general contemplation" and "merely proposed" and "includes a large number of rules that are in a highly preliminary state, with no reliable cost estimate."
In other words, regulations that the Administration plans to issue don't count. The President's health-care plan doesn't affect hiring because it doesn't really kick in until 2014, and the Dodd-Frank financial reregulation isn't a drag on lending because no one knows what dozens of agencies may do, except that it will be very expensive.
Mr. Obama adds that "it is extremely important to minimize regulatory burdens and to avoid unjustified regulatory costs." That "unjustified" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, but we'll merely note that you can't minimize or avoid them if you pretend they don't exist until they formally enter the Federal Register.
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D-F boggles even the mind of Pravda on the Hudson:
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The amount billed by Debevoise & Plimpton to write a 17-page letter on a new rule intended to rein in risky banking — around $100,000 — would make most authors jealous.
That’s the fee just for parsing the proper definition of a bank-owned hedge fund. Longer and more complex regulatory missives, weighing in on who should be deemed too big to fail or how derivatives are traded, can easily cost twice as much.
These comment letters could save Wall Street banks billions of dollars if they help persuade policy makers to adopt a more lenient interpretation of the coming rules. And white-shoe law firms like Debevoise & Plimpton are cranking them out by the dozen.
Call it Dodd-Frank Inc. A year after Congress passed the broadest financial overhaul since the Great Depression, the law has spawned a host of new businesses to help Wall Street comply — and capitalize — on the hundreds of new regulations.
Besides the lawyers, there are legions of corporate accountants, financial consultants, risk management advisers, turnaround artists and technology vendors all vying for their cut.
“It is a full-employment act,” said Gregory J. Lyons, a partner at Debevoise, where a team of a half-dozen lawyers has drafted 30-plus comment letters in the last six months.
“The law is passed, but we are still reasonably early in the process,” Mr. Lyons said. “There is still a lot to be written.”
New regulation has long been one of Washington’s unofficial job creation tools. After the enactment of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in the late 1970s, hundreds of lawyers and accountants were hired by companies to strengthen their internal controls. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 became a boon for the Big Four accounting firms as public corporations were forced to tighten compliance in the wake of the Enron and WorldCom scandals.
Now, the Dodd-Frank Act is quickly becoming such a gold mine that even Wall Street bankers, never ones to undercharge, are complaining that the costs are running amok.
“It’s basically lawyers, hired guns and money,” said the chief financial officer of a major Wall Street firm, who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. “Everyone has an angle.”
No one yet is tracking all the money being spent to deal with Dodd-Frank (which in itself could be an entrepreneurial venture), but a back-of-the-envelope calculation puts it in the billions of dollars.
And that’s not even counting the roughly $1.9 billion spent by companies lobbying on financial issues since the regulatory overhaul was first proposed in early 2009, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
The bulk of the lobbying tab was spent in the two years before Dodd-Frank took effect. Now firms are spending similarly eye-popping sums to comply with or battle against the rules emerging from the law. They are turning to existing companies that have started dedicated teams like the one at Debevoise & Plimpton, as well as start-ups like the Invictus Consulting Group.
When Kamal Mustafa founded Invictus in early 2008, few banks underwent routine stress tests to assess their financial health. Now, the new law requires the nation’s largest banks to conduct annual stress tests, while regulators are leaning hard on smaller lenders to take similar measures. As a result, Invictus’s business — dispensing advice on how to properly administer those exams — has taken off.
“You can stress-test all you want, but somebody has to validate the results,” Mr. Mustafa said. “That’s a massive opportunity.”
Regulators from seven states — including California, New Jersey and Pennsylvania — have hired his firm, Mr. Mustafa said, and he is selectively signing up two to four new bank clients a month. Annual advisory fees start at $20,000 and can reach $100,000 or more.
With business booming, Mr. Mustafa said he planned to hire 40 to 50 former bankers in the coming months, almost quadrupling his current staff. And in May, Invictus established its first European outpost: a London office focused on overseas banks and regulators.
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Technology vendors, including I.B.M. and SunGard Consulting Services, are expecting huge windfalls from the new systems that banks will need to churn out vast amounts of data for regulators, or to lower the cost of processing a derivatives trade. Wall Street banks and asset managers are expected to spend more than $3.8 billion from this year to 2013 on technology to cope with all the new financial rules, according to the TowerGroup, a technology research firm.
Retail banking consultants are racking up new assignments advising banks on how to make up missing revenue from lost debit card fees, while governance advisers are helping firms assess whether executive pay packages will pass muster with shareholders, who are now entitled to a nonbinding say-on-pay vote.
Some law firms have even become small-scale publishing houses. Davis Polk & Wardwell, for example, is offering a $7,500-a-month subscription to a Web site that tracks the progress of every Dodd-Frank requirement. So far, more than 30 large financial companies have signed up.
As Congress started drafting the legislation in the spring of 2010, Davis Polk & Wardwell began compiling a spreadsheet to keep its lawyers updated on hundreds of regulations. Then, Gabriel D. Rosenberg, a young associate, proposed turning the firm’s database of legal summaries and rule-making deadlines into an interactive site — and spent a weekend building a prototype.
By late July, clients started logging on to the “regulatory tracker” — and have steered more business to the firm as a result, said Randall D. Guynn, the head of Davis Polk’s financial institutions group. “There were a lot of new relationships because people want this,” he said.
Perhaps the biggest new business established by Dodd-Frank stems from the requirement that large financial institutions establish living wills, or emergency plans to wind themselves down in the event of a collapse. Firms are hiring small armies of outside advisers to develop the plans and handle the mountains of paperwork, according to people involved in the process.
As a result, global law firms like Clifford Chance and Sullivan & Cromwell; accounting firms like Deloitte and PricewaterhouseCoopers; and financial consultancies like Oliver Wyman and the Promontory Financial Group, are all working overtime to land assignments. Even restructuring boutiques, like Alvarez & Marsal and Houlihan Lokey, are elbowing their way in.
Armed with a 60-slide visual presentation, Houlihan Lokey executives approached about a dozen Wall Street firms this spring with an offer to help draft their living wills.
Their sales pitch: we mapped out funeral plans for Lehman Brothers and the CIT Group during the throes of the crisis; we can help with your final arrangements, too.
“When we do a restructuring, we advise our clients and then execute on it,” said Michael McMahon, the head of Houlihan’s financial institutions group. “We are doing the exact same thing here — but we just have to document it.”
It is lucrative work. Barclays said earlier this summer that it has spent more than £30 million, or $48 million, on outside advisers and in-house staff to draft its living will. Each of the five biggest Wall Street banks and several other large financial companies could easily spend just as much.
What is more, most global firms will need to have several versions of their living wills to satisfy the requirements of the different national regulators. That should keep the billable hours coming.
Lawyers and consultants are salivating at the prospect of even more business opportunities. Some envision that many of the banks’ largest creditors will hire them to figure out how they might fare if the living wills were actually to take effect.
“They are going to ask, ‘What is going to happen to me?’ ” said Chip MacDonald, a lawyer at Jones Day. “We are only getting started.”
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If this does not illustrate the total incompetence of government than nothing will. They cannot even secure the *mint* from their own employees.
How can someone sneak out 2.4 million one dollar gold coins before being caught? Did he have help?
And the guy is an ex Fed cop. Surprise surprise surpirse:
***A former federal cop assigned to the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia admitted stealing $2.4 million in "error" coins.
William Gray, 64, of North Wildwood, N.J., admitted in federal court that he took the $1 presidential coins, all missing edge lettering, and sold them to a California coin dealer. Gray pleaded guilty to theft of government property and income tax evasion, said U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman.
Gray had worked at the U.S. Mint since 1996. He said he took the coins knowing they would be considered more valuable to collectors because they were considered "mint errors." He mailed them from New Jersey.
He was freed on $50,000 bail and will be sentenced on Dec. 20.
Posted Friday, Sep 9, 2011 - 7:09 AM EDT****
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I am caught wondering how big a one dollar gold coin can be, at roughly 1/32000th of a pound. :-( Does it have Obama or Bernancke's mug on it?
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I am caught wondering how big a one dollar gold coin can be, at roughly 1/32000th of a pound. :-( Does it have Obama or Bernancke's mug on it?
Rev. Wright with "God damn America" on one side and Bill Ayers on the other.
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Very funny GM! Which side is heads and which is considered the side symbolizing where the excrement comes out.
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Like that animal in Dr. Doolittle that had a head at each end (Pushme-pullyou?) both of these guys are mouth. Lacking an anus explains why they are full of excrement.
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Actually the coins would not have been gold; maybe silver or non precious metal and may have been dollars or halves?
Like US paper money the metal coins are hardly even worth the metal they are made out of.
Don't pennies cost more to make than they are valued?
Come to think of it aren't we murdering too many trees by printing so much money? Think of the carbon dioxide not soaked up and the oxygen not produced.
Its a good thing we print $20 ,50 100 bills lest we wipe out the enitre Amazon forest if the 14 trillion in debt were dollars.
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Yes, they are only gold in coloring. That is a little deceptive, the cartoon look would be more honest. With the full faith and credit gone, you go with what you have. They are not commonly used, it would be a little hard to slip a couple of million of them into circulation unnoticed. Imagine the size though - on a microscope - if they were gold. Ron Paul had a funny line that gas still is 10 cents - a silver dime is worth about a gallon.
Yes, who knows how much CO2 is emitted in the excess printing of devalued dollars. Innocent trees with their lives cut short, for no good reason. Maybe we can get the federal regulators to cap them.
Most money really of course exists only as an electronic accounting entry.
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What is the cost of overregulation? Bank of America appears to have provided part of the answer by announcing yesterday that the nation's largest bank will cut 30,000 jobs between now and 2014. CEO Brian Moynihan said the bank's plan is to slash $5 billion in annual expenses from its consumer businesses.
Mr. Moynihan didn't say this, but we will: These layoffs are part of the bill for the last two years of Washington's financial rule-writing. After loose monetary policy had combined with insane housing policy to create a financial crisis, the Democrats who ran Washington in 2009 and 2010 enacted myriad new rules that had nothing to do with easy money or housing.
Take the amendment that Illinois Democrat and Senator Dick Durbin (with the help of 17 Senate Republicans) attached to last year's Dodd-Frank financial law. Mr. Durbin's amendment instructed the Federal Reserve to limit the amount of "swipe fees" that banks can charge merchants when customers use debit cards.
How exactly does forcing banks to charge Wal-Mart less money for operating an electronic payment system prevent the next financial crisis? Readers may wait a long time for a satisfactory answer, but the cost of this Dodd-Frank directive is straightforward.
The Fed dutifully ordered banks to cut their fees almost in half. Bank of America disclosed in its most recent quarterly report that this change will reduce the bank's debit-card revenues by $475 million in just the fourth quarter of this year. The new rules take effect on October 1, so BofA seems to have sensible timing as it begins to shed workers from a consumer business that has become suddenly less profitable by federal edict.
Make that the latest federal edict. In 2009, when a comprehensive overhaul of financial regulation was still a gleam in Barney Frank's eye, President Obama signed the CARD Act into law. It limited the ability of banks to increase rates on delinquent borrowers and to charge fees on unprofitable customers. As Washington encouraged card issuers to be more selective in advancing credit and to demand higher rates when they do, interest rates on card customers predictably increased relative to other types of lending in the months after the law took effect.
Restricting bank profits on a particular product may have obvious populist appeal, but politicians shouldn't be surprised if banks decide that such consumer credit operations aren't good businesses and can function with fewer employees. Add in the various federal programs aimed at extracting penalties for this or that mortgage-foreclosure error and it's understandable that a bank would have trouble forecasting growth to justify its current work force.
To be sure, Bank of America is also suffering from its own mistake in deciding to buy Countrywide Financial in 2008. As for the financial industry generally, it had become distended and needed to shrink after the bubble years of easy money.
But given the real-world results for bank employees, politicians should not be allowed to pretend that there are no consequences when they deliberately reduce the profitability of employers. Mr. Obama proposed last week to spend some $450 billion more in outlays or tax credits to create more jobs, but it would have cost a lot less to save these 30,000.
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The Environmental Protection Agency's political agenda hasn't gotten any less reckless, but the news is that the rest of the government is beginning to notice—including a majority of the states and even other regulators. And now they are pushing back. This turn comes in the nick of time, since one of the EPA's more destructive rules is due to be finalized next month.
At issue is the so-called utility rule that would impose new limits on mercury and other hazardous air pollutants. The regulation is the most costly in the EPA's history in return for marginal benefits. It was rushed out to force a large portion of the country's coal-fired power plants to shut down. On top of other such de facto anticarbon rules, this could compromise the reliability of the electric system if as much as 8% of generating capacity is subtracted from the grid.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission—which is charged with protecting reliability—admitted as much last year in a preliminary analysis, only to withdraw the document and refuse to update it. But now one of FERC's five commissioners is calling out his own boss for this abdication.
In a recent letter to Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, who has been probing FERC, Commissioner Phillip Moeller admits, "I can't affirm that EPA actions will not materially degrade reliability, nor can I speak for the entire Commission and how it will carry out its statutory obligations." He added that FERC "should be involved in the rulemaking process of a federal agency if such involvement helps reduce threats to reliability."
That's precisely what FERC Chairman Jon Wellinghoff is refusing to do, perhaps as a favor to his political patron Harry Reid. The Chairman has broad powers over FERC's work, much like a CEO, even if other commissioners dissent. The technical experts in the reliability office itself are also worried, as internal documents show. Mr. Moeller has repeatedly said he is "fuel neutral" but that as a Commissioner, "I cannot be neutral on the subject of reliability," as he put it at a September hearing.
Mr. Moeller also dismisses Mr. Wellinghoff's endorsement of a "safety valve" that would give FERC the power to overrule the EPA if it thinks its rules might lead to blackouts—but only after the fact. "I do not know what exemption process would work best for administering what may become a complex task of determining which set of power plants will need to operate for reliability purposes," Mr. Moeller writes. In other words, no regulator has the omniscience to decide which plants are "must run" and therefore deserving of a safety-valve exemption. The only way we'll know is after there's a disaster.
This week FERC said it would convene a reliability conference, but by the time it arrives in November it will be too late to convince the EPA to publish a more reasonable rule. The Texas utility Luminant has already shuttered two coal plants (farewell, 500 jobs) in response to the regulatory cascade, and many more closures are on the way.
Meanwhile, 11 Governors last week wrote to the EPA to protest the utility rule, warning that "full-time power availability could be at risk." And earlier this week 25 state Attorneys General—including four Democrats—filed suit to lift a legal document known as a consent decree that the EPA is using as a fig leaf for its political goals.
This 2008 court order says the utility rule must be issued by November, which is how the EPA justifies its aggressive political schedule. But the EPA wrote the consent decree and explicitly says, "If EPA needs more time to get it right, it can seek more time." EPA, naturally, hasn't done so—despite major errors in the proposal including one that confused "megawatts" with "gigawatts" and thereby set emissions standards that were incorrect by a factor of 1,000.
Between the Governors and AGs, some 27 states are merely asking the EPA to delay the final rule until the risks can be properly quantified, which is also Senator Murkowski's request. Despite the poor quality of its work, EPA has refused to slow down. While the new protests are welcome, at this point the only thing that will pull back the throttle is a White House intervention.
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If you tried to write a parody of the uncertainty and confusion triggered by federal rule-making, it would be hard to top the latest proposal from Washington's financial regulators. So here's an ironic hat tip to the bureaucrats who wrote the draft Volcker Rule, which will allegedly limit risk-taking at financial firms backed by taxpayers.
In 298 pages, rather than sketching out simple, clear rules for banks to follow, regulators essentially wonder out loud how they can possibly write this rule. Officially there are 383 questions posed in the document, but many of these questions have multiple parts. Our colleagues at the Deal Journal blog counted 1,347 queries, covering everything from how "trading accounts" should be defined to what a "loan" is.
The regulators admit that "the delineation of what constitutes a prohibited or permitted activity . . . involves subtle distinctions that are difficult both to describe comprehensively within regulation and to evaluate in practice." Think of this as a cry for help from bureaucrats seeking an understanding of the markets they are nonetheless going to restructure come what may.
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Bank lobbyists are certainly eager to provide some hand-holding. We wouldn't be surprised to see thousands of pages of suggestions roll in between now and January 13, when the public comment period ends. Many of these comments will no doubt offer compelling reasons why a particular type of transaction should be exempt from the principle that nobody should be gambling with a taxpayer backstop. The regulators will then have about six months to consider all of these suggestions, ponder the thousands of answers to their 1,347 questions, and then write a final rule. At least that's what the 2010 fiasco known as Dodd-Frank demands.
Dodd-Frank demands all this from regulators because for the life of them former Senator Chris Dodd and Representative Barney Frank couldn't figure out how to write a Volcker Rule themselves. Like nearly every other tough call in financial regulation, Messrs. Dodd and Frank punted this one to the executive branch, invested federal agencies with new authority, and expected the same regulators who failed to prevent the last crisis to somehow avert the next one.
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Paul Volcker, former Federal Reserve Chairman.
.We supported former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker's concept of a ban on proprietary trading as a good-faith effort to protect taxpayers from having to rescue too-big-to-fail banks again. Democrats in Congress weren't going to prevent future bailouts, so whenever an institution is playing with taxpayer money (via insured deposits or access to the Fed's discount window) it should be allowed to serve clients but should not be permitted to make trades for its own proprietary account. But drafting such a law isn't easy and the details are crucial.
When America's esteemed legislators couldn't figure out how to write a Volcker Rule, they forwarded it to the bureaucracy as a kind of Volcker Suggestion. But before the lawmakers enacted this remarkable delegation of authority, they gutted even the Volcker Suggestion by exempting certain instruments from consideration.
Lawmakers made clear that whatever the shape of the final rule, it would not interfere with the liquidity of the U.S. Treasury market or debt issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. So even if bureaucrats spend most of the next year crafting the perfect rule, it will still allow Wall Street giants to make enormous bets on the direction of U.S. government bonds and debt issued by government-sponsored enterprises. There are also built-in exemptions in the commodities market. There will likely be limits on trading derivatives of commodities, but if traders are buying actual physical assets they can still swing for the fences.
Even outside of these exempted zones of politically favored speculation, the recent proposal suggests that we're not going to get anything close to perfection. And some of the regulators may already have figured this out. Readers will recall that Dodd-Frank created the Financial Stability Oversight Council so that the chiefs of the various regulatory agencies could coordinate their actions to identify and attack risks to the financial system. But one of the knights of this regulatory round table was missing when they decided to saddle up on this quest to tilt at Goldman's risk book.
The draft rule carries the names of various Beltway departments but not the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Since the CFTC now oversees much of the derivatives market, which in Beltway lore is the principal cause of systemic risk, it's an odd omission. A cynic might even wonder if CFTC Chairman Gary Gensler is checking the political winds before endorsing this turkey. A source at the commission says that the agency is backed up fulfilling other Dodd-Frank mandates but will get to Volcker eventually.
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They shouldn't bother. Reasonable people have seen enough to say that Washington is incapable of drawing bright lines and applying clear rules fairly across all securities markets. The result is all but certain to be a final rule that different people will interpret different ways, leading to loopholes for traders and arbitrary enforcement. Under this Beltway rendering of Volcker, trading will continue but with a much higher bureaucratic cost and with the illusion of safety that only regulation can create.
Until the government is willing to create a durable financial system that allows failure, the best policy response is to make the rules so simple that even Washington can enforce them. That means higher, even very high, bank capital standards and margin requirements on risky trades between banks. Those aren't panaceas, but they offer more hope for taxpayers than the bureaucratic and bank-lobbyist jump ball that is now the Volcker Rule.
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WASHINGTON — President Obama will issue an executive order on Monday that the administration hopes will help resolve a growing number of critical shortages of vital medicines used to treat life-threatening illnesses, among them several forms of cancer and bacterial infections.
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U.S. Scrambling to Ease Shortage of Vital Medicine (August 20, 2011)
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The order offers drug manufacturers and wholesalers both a helping hand and a gloved fist in efforts to prevent or resolve shortages that have worsened greatly in recent years, endangering thousands of lives.
It instructs the F.D.A. to do three things: broaden reporting of potential shortages of certain prescription drugs; speed reviews of applications to begin or alter production of these drugs; and provide more information to the Justice Department about possible instances of collusion or price gouging.
Such efforts are included in proposed legislation that has been pending in Congress since February despite bipartisan support for its provisions.
The order, the first since 1985 by a president to affect the functions of the Food and Drug Administration, is part of a series of recent executive orders involving such disparate issues as mortgage relief and jobs for veterans. They are intended to show that the president, plagued by low approval ratings, is working to resolve the nation’s problems despite a Congress largely paralyzed by partisan disagreements.
“The president’s action is a recognition of the fact that this is a serious problem, and we can and should do more to help solve it,” said an administration official who asked to remain anonymous to avoid upstaging the official announcement on Monday. “We can’t wait anymore.”
So far this year, at least 180 drugs that are crucial for treating childhood leukemia, breast and colon cancer, infections and other diseases have been declared in short supply — a record number. Prices for some have risen as much as eightyfold, and clinical trials for some experimental cures have been delayed because the studies must also offer older medicines that cannot be reliably provided.
Patients with entirely curable diseases have been forced to take medicines that may not be as effective, adding anxiety to an already terrible ordeal.
The president’s order is a modest effort that, while possibly helpful, is unlikely to resolve the problem soon or entirely. Administration officials characterized it as one step in a long and complicated effort. Indeed, Mr. Obama eschewed more ambitious proposals — like government drug stockpiling or manufacturing — that would have injected the government more directly into the nation’s drug market and cost more but that might have been more effective.
Still, Mr. Obama’s order and others he has issued recently reflect his belief in the power of government to improve people’s lives. By contrast, top Republican legislators and presidential candidates have almost uniformly argued that resolving the nation’s economic and other problems depends mostly on scaling back or ending government regulations to allow the free market to function more effectively. No regulatory agency touches people’s lives more thoroughly than the F.D.A., which regulates 25 cents of every dollar spent by consumers.
Along with Mr. Obama’s order, on Monday the administration will release two government reports that mostly blame a dysfunctional marketplace for drug shortages, directly contradicting assertions by some commentators that government rules are to blame. The analyses found that 74 percent of the medicines in short supply in 2010 were sterile injectibles, the kind of drugs delivered in hospitals or clinics to treat cancer or anesthetize patients before surgery.
The economic and technical hurdles to participating in this market have made it exceedingly inflexible, the analyses found. Just five large hospital buying groups purchase nearly 90 percent of the needed medicines, and only seven companies manufacture the vast majority of supply. In most cases, one company produces at least 90 percent of a drug’s supply, and crucial ingredients — many of them made in mammoth plants in India and China — are often difficult to find, verify and approve, so years are needed to create new capacity. While demand has grown steadily in recent years, supply capacity has remained largely unchanged.
With so much supply dependent on so few companies and facilities, safety problems that arise anywhere in the system can result in enormous disruptions. Nearly half of the shortages followed inspections that found serious quality problems, including injectibles that had glass shards, metal filings and bacterial and fungal contamination, the reports found.
Even the generic drug industry is calling for more regulation. The industry recently agreed to provide the F.D.A. with nearly $300 million annually to bolster inspections and speed drug applications. That amounts to about 1 percent of the industry’s revenues and about 5 percent of its profits in the United States, an extraordinary vote of confidence in the government’s ability to improve the situation.
This money and an industry campaign to build more capacity may eventually resolve much of the supply disruptions. In the meantime, Mr. Obama will promise Monday to strengthen the staff of the drug agency’s shortages team to deal with what are expected to be far more and detailed communications with manufacturers about events that could affect drug supplies, officials said.
The administration will also send letters to manufacturers reminding them of their legal responsibility to report pending supply disruptions of certain drugs and to encourage them to notify the drug agency of events that could possibly lead to disruptions even when not required to do so.
The rules needed to expand required notifications will take time to finalize, but the president’s order will speed that process, administration officials said. The president will also announce his support of legislation proposed in both the House and Senate to expand even further reporting requirements from manufacturers.
Mr. Obama’s order that the F.D.A. report to the Justice Department possible instances of price gouging or collusion is largely directed at the shadowy and fading world of small wholesalers that buy drugs from one set of users and in times of shortage sell them at huge markups to another. In one case, a leukemia drug that normally sold for $12 per vial was being sold for $990 per vial — 80 times higher. A survey found that small wholesalers typically increased prices by 650 percent during shortages.
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On a sweltering day in August, federal agents raided the Tennessee factories of the storied Gibson Guitar Corp. The suggestion was that Gibson had violated the Lacey Act—a federal law designed to protect wildlife—by importing certain India ebony. The company has vehemently denied that suggestion and has yet to be charged. It is instead living in a state of harassed legal limbo.
Which, let's be clear, is exactly what its persecutors had planned all along. The untold story of Gibson is this: It was set up.
Most of the press coverage has implied that the company is the unfortunate victim of a well-meaning, if complicated, law. Stories note, in passing, that the Lacey Act was "expanded" in 2008, and that this has had "unintended consequences." Given Washington's reputation for ill-considered bills, this might make sense.
Only not in this case. The story here is about how a toxic alliance of ideological activists and trade protectionists deliberately set about creating a vague law, one designed to make an example out of companies (like Gibson) and thus chill imports—even legal ones.
The Lacey Act was passed in 1900 to stop trade in illegal wild game. Over the years it has expanded, and today it encompasses a range of endangered species. It requires American businesses to follow both U.S. and foreign law, though with most Lacey goods, this has been relatively clear. Think elephant tusks, tiger pelts or tropical birds.
That changed in 2007, when an alliance of environmentalists, labor unions and industry groups began pushing for Lacey to cover "plant and plant products" and related items. Congress had previously resisted such a broad definition for the simple reason that it would encompass timber products. Trees are ubiquitous, are transformed into thousands of byproducts, and pass through dozens of countries. Whereas even a small U.S. importer would know not to import a tiger skin, tracking a sliver of wood (now transformed into a toy, or an umbrella) through this maze of countries and manufacturing laws back to the tree it came from, would be impossible.
Furniture maker Ikea noted that even if it could comply with the change, the "administrative costs and record-keeping requirements" would cause furniture prices to "skyrocket." The wood chips that go into its particleboard alone could require tracking back and reporting on more than 100 different tree species.
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Painted guitars hang to dry after being lacquered at the Gibson Guitar Corp. factory in Nashville, Tenn.
.Which is exactly what the Lacey expanders wanted. The drive was headed up by a murky British green outfit called the Environmental Investigation Agency. The EIA is anti-logging, and, like most environmental groups, understands that the best way to force developing countries to "preserve" their natural resources is to dry up the market for their products. They would prefer that wood be sourced from the U.S. and Europe, where green groups have more influence over rules.
The EIA was joined by labor unions such as the Teamsters and industry groups such as the American Forest and Paper Association. As Mark Barford of the Memphis-based National Hardwood Lumber Association told one news outlet: "We need the protection of the Lacey Act. . . . Our small, little companies cannot compete with artificially low prices from wood that comes in illegally. . . . This is our Jobs Act."
While everyone can be against "illegal" wood, what this crew understood was that the complexity of complying with an expanded Lacey Act would discourage companies from importing even legal wood. They went to Sen. Ron Wyden, of the well-timbered Oregon, who dutifully introduced legislation.
Mr. Wyden cleverly attached it to the wildly popular 2008 farm bill, guaranteeing its passage. Even then, some lawmakers sought to ensure that companies weren't unfairly ensnared. In October 2008, Louisiana Sen. David Vitter sent a letter to the Justice Department's Environment and Natural Resources Division (whose career staff is notorious for pursuing a green agenda), asking it to clarify whether any companies acting in good faith would be granted some protection from the law. The division has never clarified.
And so Gibson has been trapped, as intended. The company, after all, is not accused of importing banned wood (say, Brazilian mahogany). The ebony it bought is legal and documented. The issue is whether Gibson ran afoul of a technical Indian law governing the export of finished wood products. The U.S. government's interpretation of Indian law suggests the wood Gibson imported wasn't finished enough. Got that?
The EIA, which helped author the Wyden legislation, happens to have spent years publicly targeting Gibson for buying foreign wood. Oh, to see the Justice Department's communications with outside groups.
Gibson was picked because it is famous and, sure enough, its travails have scared importers away from an array of foreign wood products. Tennessee Reps. Marsha Blackburn and Jim Cooper are now working to give companies some protection and reduce paperwork. On cue, the EIA is howling that Congress is "gutting" Lacey.
Congress would be better off doing just that—repealing the expansion in its entirety. The provision does nothing to stamp out illegal logging—the products from which were already clearly no-nos. This isn't environmental protection; it's hostage-taking.
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Obama takes on big government: 'It has to change'
President Barack Obama delivers remarks on government reform, Friday, Jan. 13, 2012, in the East Room of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo - Haraz N. Ghanbari)
BEN FELLER
From Associated Press
January 14, 2012 1:36 AM EST
WASHINGTON (AP) — Seeking more power to shrink the government, President Barack Obama on Friday suggested smashing six economic agencies into one, an election-year idea intended to halt bureaucratic nightmares and force Republicans to back him on one of their own favorite issues.
"The government we have is not the government we need," Obama told business owners he'd gathered at the White House. Lawmakers seemed willing to at least consider his ideas.
Sounding like a manager of a disorganized company, and looking like one by pointing to slides as he spoke, Obama asked Congress to give him a kind of reorganization power no president has had since Ronald Reagan. It would guarantee Obama a vote, within 90 days, on any idea he offers to consolidate agencies, provided it saves money and cuts the government.
His first potential target: Merging six major trade and commerce agencies into a one-stop-shopping department for American businesses. The Commerce Department would be among those that would cease to exist.
Attacking senseless duplication across the executive branch he runs, Obama said: "Why is it OK for our government? It's not. It has to change."
Politically, Obama is seeking advantage on the turf often owned by Republicans: Smaller government.
He is attempting to directly counter Republican arguments that he has presided over the kind of regulation, spending and debt that can undermine the economy — a dominant theme of this year's debate and one often cited by his potential re-election rival, Republican Mitt Romney.
Obama said he would use his expanded authority to recommend the collapsing of other agencies across the government, not just in the business field, without getting specific. Congress would keep the final say over any proposal. But fast-track power would give Obama a stronger hand to skip much of the outside lobbying and turf battles and get right to a vote.
Congressional reaction was mixed, but generally followed a pattern from both parties — support for making government more efficient, and wariness about how Obama's plan could upend the trade American trade agenda or undermine the prerogatives of Congress.
Republicans skeptically pointed to Obama's past promises as the size of the nation's debt keeps growing.
"It's not often that we see real proposals from this administration to make government smaller," said Rep. Fred Upton, the Michigan Republican who is chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. "I look forward to reviewing the proposal and hope that it will be the first of many to unravel the red tape."
Indeed, Obama promised more plans to shrink things if given more power, citing inefficiencies all across the government.
In an unusual united front that underscored some bipartisan skepticism, the chairmen of two of Congress' most powerful committees joined in a statement that questioned the president's desire to wrap the U.S. Trade Representative office into a new agency. The House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich., and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont, said government cannot be reduced "at the expense of programs that are helping businesses, ranchers and farmers create jobs."
For Obama, it was all about common sense.
He spoke of business people who deal with the government as part of their daily life and are exasperated by a maze of agencies, permits and websites.
"We can do this better," he told them. "So much of the argument out there all the time is up in 40,000 feet, these abstract arguments about who's conservative or who's liberal. ...You guys are just trying to figure out, how do we make things work? How do we apply common sense? And that's what this is about."
Obama had an imperative to deliver. He made the promise to come up with a smart reorganization of the government in his State of the Union speech last January.
Not in decades has the government undergone a sustained reorganization of itself. Presidents have tried from time to time, but each part of the bureaucracy has its own defenders inside and outside the government, which can make merger ideas politically impossible. That's particularly true because "efficiency" is often another way of saying people will lose their jobs.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said she hoped Congress would quickly approve Obama's proposal, which she said tracked with worries Democrats have been hearing from small business owners.
Beyond the politics, the merger Obama offered would have big implications for trade and commerce in America.
Presidents held a fast-track reorganizational authority for about 50 years until it ran out during Reagan's presidency in 1984, the White House argued.
Obama wants to merge: the Commerce Department's core business and trade functions; the Small Business Administration; the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative; the Export-Import Bank; the Overseas Private Investment Corporation; and the Trade and Development Agency.
The White House says 1,000 to 2,000 jobs would be cut, but the administration would do so through attrition. The administration says the consolidation would save $3 billion over 10 years by getting rid of duplicative overhead and programs, although it has yet to spell out any plan in detail.
Obama's announcement treads on ground that Romney, the Republican front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, frequently stakes out on the campaign trail. Romney often says he would try to shrink government by eliminating offices that duplicate functions performed somewhere else, citing as examples more than 80 different workforce training programs.
Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said streamlining government was always a potentially good idea but expressed suspicion about whether the plan by Obama would really help business. Don Stewart, spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, pledged Obama's plan would get a careful review.
But he added: "It's interesting to see the president finally acknowledge that Washington is out of control."
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Clinton made this an art form. :?
It is interesting to note the agencies are all in the commerce department.
Of all the agencies this is the one he will "streamline". :roll:
I dare not use the "L" word. :wink:
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Needed: A New Laffer Curve - by Steven Hayward
The Laffer Curve—the conceptual device illustrating how high marginal tax rates reduced revenue and economic growth—helped revolutionize tax policy around the world thirty five years ago. Every advanced nation followed the United States in lowering tax rates on income (both personal and corporate) and capital investment in the 1980s; many did so more vigorously than we did. (The definitive treatment of the subject is Brian Domitrovic’s Econoclasts. Belongs on everyone’s economics bookshelf.) While the Left kvetches against the Laffer Curve, I note that not even the most leftist governments in the industrialized world propose restoring pre-Laffer Curve income and capital gains tax rates. Game over.
Today we need a new Laffer Curve—for regulation. The thought comes to mind in contemplating George Will’s column this morning discussing the impending difficulties in deepening the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina by five feet in order to accommodate a new generation of larger container ships soon to be sailing the ocean blue:
Newsome says the study for deepening Savannah’s harbor was made in 1999. It is 2012, and studies for the environmental impact statement are not finished. When they are, the project will take five years to construct. “But before that,” he says laconically, “they’re going to be sued by groups concerned about the environmental impact.” A Newsome axiom — that institutions become risk-averse as they get challenged — is increasingly pertinent as America changes from a nation that celebrated getting things done to a nation that celebrates people and groups who prevent things from being done. . .
The Empire State Building was built in 14 months during the Depression, the Pentagon in 16 in wartime. The aircraft carrier USS Yorktown, which earned 11 battle stars in the Pacific and now is anchored here, was built in less than 17 months, back when America was serious about moving forward. Is it necessary to take eight years — just two years less than it took to build the Panama Canal with yellow fever and without computers — to deepen this harbor five feet?
It is one thing to argue that the economic benefits of health and safety regulations, such as air and water pollution, etc., outweigh the costs, though the EPA’s methodology for making these calculations is highly convenient. But we can leave that head-splitting methodological argument for another time. How can the economic benefits possibly outweigh the massive delays which amount to outright prevention of projects from being built (see: Keystone XL pipeline, or see the Project/NoProject? website for a cumulative rundown of projects currently held up in the environmental review process)? More to the point, does the long, litigation-heavy environmental review process we currently use actually deliver environmental benefits? More often it is simply used as an obstructionist measure. (I noted in watching a Keystone pipeline hearing that most of the complaints were simply blanket opposition to building the pipelines at all, not specific complaints about a harm that needed to be avoided somehow.)
Here’s where we need the regulatory equivalent of the Laffer Curve. Take the Keystone pipeline as an example. The pipeline is likely to be approved eventually, but only after more years of review and litigation. Certainly measures will need to be taken to reduce the environmental risks of the pipeline, but is there any safety measure that we will eventually impose that we didn’t recognize in the first six months of the review process? It’s not like we’ve never built a pipeline before, or learned from previous pipeline accidents (like the one in Montana last summer). Are there really any potential environmental impacts of deepening a harbor in South Carolina by five feet that require six to ten years of review and litigation, and a three-thousand page Environmental Impact Statement?
Clearly the review process we have now is largely deadweight loss, just as high marginal tax rates discouraged capital formation, investment, and productivity improvements in the high-inflation 1970s. We can arguably afford the extravagance of regulatory suffocation when the economy is booming at 4 percent growth a year or better (as in the late 1990s) and unemployment is 5 percent. We cannot afford it under the current stagnant circumstances. A Laffer Curve for regulation will explore just how much economic growth and how many jobs were are sacrificing for this artificial punctiliousness.
What needs to be done? The regulatory review process ought to have a short deadline. Agency review should be completed within six or nine months, with a presumption in favor of granting permission unless an agency can delineate a substantively new problem based on precedents from previous similar projects (that is, no speculative objections based on what global warming might do 75 years from now, as actually happened to a proposed project in California a few years back where regulators denied a building permit on the theory that rising sea levels would make the land habitat for an endangered species that would want to move upland). Standing to sue to block projects should be tightened, and the threshold for hearing such suits made much more restrictive. And how about requiring that all Environmental Impact Statements be no longer than 200 pages? I’m sure all the environmental lawyers and consultants who charge by the hour and make a bundle doing these multi-volume EIRs that no one reads will howl, but if the Supreme Court can limit briefs to 50 pages on matters of high constitutional importance, why can’t our regulatory process not emulate a standard of brevity that emphasizes the essential over the frivolous and tedious?
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/01/needed-a-new-laffer-curve.php
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For the latest example of regulatory overreach, look no further than the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which is pushing through a rule to support racial loan quotas a few months before the Supreme Court will rule on whether that's legal. The Obama Administration's "fair housing" agenda, apparently, just can't wait.
At issue is the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which prohibits discrimination "because of race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin" (our italics). The language clearly implies an intent to discriminate. But courts have brushed the pesky text aside over the years, citing language in other 1960s-era statutes that allows the use of "disparate impact" analysis, which doesn't require intent and relies instead on statistical data about lending outcomes over larger populations of borrowers.
The Obama Administration's Department of Justice has taken full advantage of this loophole, accusing banks big and small of racial discrimination under the Fair Housing Act. Most CEOs have decided to settle rather than risk PR damage and litigation costs that could cost banks millions of dollars.
The Supreme Court decided to weigh in on November 7 when it agreed to hear Magner v. Gallagher, a case that will address whether disparate-impact analysis under the Fair Housing Act is legal or not. On November 16, HUD issued its proposed rule and concluded it is. HUD general counsel Helen Kanovsky says the rule was "on the agenda" since the Obama Administration took office and she hoped the Court would "wait" for HUD's rule-making. Well, that's a strange view of the judiciary's role to interpret the constitutionality of laws versus a regulator's role to implement them.
HUD closed the comment period on the proposed rule last week and the letters are instructive. A George Washington University sociologist wants HUD to hurry up and issue the final rule, "given the Court's deference to agency interpretation of statutory language in regulations." The ever-politicized Attorneys General of New York, Massachusetts, Illinois and other states think "discrimination and segregation in housing remain pervasive and intractable problems" but present no evidence to prove those claims.
Forcing banks to lend to minorities has a dangerous cascading effect. Banks will often make credit available to borrowers who shouldn't get a mortgage, merely to meet their quotas and avoid lawsuits. When those loans go belly up, banks and their shareholders have to pick up the tab—and that raises the price of loans for everyone. Some lenders will conclude they don't want the litigation risk and exit the market, reducing competition and choice.
All lending in a capitalist system requires some form of discrimination to determine who can afford a loan, and some kind of bargaining to strike a deal. HUD seems to want to eliminate both and deem who can get what loan, at what cost. As the Justices consider Magner, we trust they have noticed HUD's unseemly rush to issue a rule in a bid to sway their decision.
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WSJ
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304636404577299993426004550.html?mod=opinion_newsreel
By JASON L. RILEY
Perhaps no one on Capitol Hill was more pleased than Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul with the Supreme Court's decision this week to side with an Idaho couple who is fighting the Environmental Protection Agency.
When the couple, Mike and Chantell Sackett, decided in 2007 to build a vacation home on land that they owned near a lake, the EPA ordered them to stop. The agency told the couple that they were building on wetlands without a permit. But in a unanimous ruling Wednesday, the court held that landowners can sue to challenge EPA compliance orders that are issued under the Clean Water Act.
"From this point forward, citizens like the Sacketts will be able to challenge the EPA in court before huge fines and other actions are levied against them," said Mr. Paul, a Republican, in a statement after the ruling. "I will continue to fight to rein in the EPA, and today's decision is heartening that we will succeed."
To that end, Mr. Paul has authored a bill -- the Defense of Environment and Property Act -- that would limit the scope of the Clean Water Act, which Justice Samuel Alito helpfully identified as the real problem.
"The reach of the Clean Water Act is notoriously unclear. Any piece of land that is wet at least part of the year is in danger of being classified by EPA employees as wetlands covered by the act," wrote Justice Alito in his concurrence. "The court's decision provides a modest measure of relief," he added. "Real relief requires Congress to do what it should have done in the first place: provide a reasonably clear rule regarding the reach of the Clean Water Act."
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Not quite sure where this comes from but it appeared in my mailbox. Not sure why the poster has a problem with gas, which apart from the global warming hoo ha, is certainly quite a bit cleaner than coal-- but the point about rule by bureaucracy certainly resonates with me.
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Obama Administration Outlaws Coal-Fired Power Plants
Stroke of the pen. Law of the land. Kinda cool.
Posted by streiff (Diary)
Tuesday, March 27th at 12:00PM EDT
Yesterday the Obama Administration effectively outlawed coal as a fuel source and it underscores the importance of Congress severely circumscribing the authority of regulatory agencies.
The Environmental Protection Agency will issue the first limits on greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants as early as Tuesday, according to several people briefed on the proposal. The move could end the construction of conventional coal-fired facilities in the United States.
The proposed rule — years in the making and approved by the White House after months of review — will require any new power plant to emit no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt of electricity produced. The average U.S. natural gas plant, which emits 800 to 850 pounds of CO2 per megawatt, meets that standard; coal plants emit an average of 1,768 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt.
By outlawing new coal-fired electric generation plants and ignoring nuclear power, the Administration has set in motion a plan to make the nation dependent upon natural gas and a mishmash of politically correct but non-viable sources such as solar and wind as older plants are decommissioned. Essentially, Obama has done via regulatory means what it could not accomplish in Congress: to set the trajectory for exorbitant electricity prices in the service of reducing “greenhouse gasses.”
This is not a new problem. Indeed, last year Speaker Boehner wrote to Obama to complain that the Administration was not being forthcoming in disclosing its regulatory agenda and, as far as I can discern, was roundly ignored.
Whether it be in the form of directing you to purchase a product you don’t wish to buy, telling religious organizations what they have to allow, or making electricity unaffordable, the cancerous growth of regulations presents the greatest danger to our liberty. Until the Congress decides to man up and take back the power that it has relinquished we are in a death spiral as a free people.
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http://theautomaticearth.org/Finance/us-employs-vinne-the-kneecapper-to-collect-student-debt.html
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/04/us/politics/gsa-las-vegas-trip-is-the-talk-of-washington.html
"When a vast but little-known government agency spent $822,000 in taxpayer money to fly 300 bureaucrats to a luxurious spa and casino outside Las Vegas for a conference in October 2010, its leaders had a goal: to make it “over the top,” according to a government report that has set Washington abuzz."
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/04/us/politics/gsa-las-vegas-trip-is-the-talk-of-washington.html
"When a vast but little-known government agency spent $822,000 in taxpayer money to fly 300 bureaucrats to a luxurious spa and casino outside Las Vegas for a conference in October 2010, its leaders had a goal: to make it “over the top,” according to a government report that has set Washington abuzz."
What? Do they think they're Michelle Obama or something?
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http://paracom.paramountcommunication.com/hostedemail/email.htm?CID=11780704875&ch=06E47C48B6AC9E6CF5AD6751F8504E3C&h=03d5e2ce32d076abe327bd581dc28ba3&ei=WF258H8nN
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Do Barbers Really Need a License?
By DICK CARPENTER
AND LISA KNEPPER
As Ohio natives, we aren't eager to extol the virtues of Michigan, but credit should be given where it is due—particularly for a proposal that would expand economic freedom and opportunity.
In April, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder proposed abolishing 18 occupational licenses and eliminating nine occupational licensing boards. It is a reform long overdue, and not just in Michigan.
Since the 1950s, the number of U.S. workers needing an occupational license—effectively a government permission slip to work—has grown from one in 20 to nearly one in three, according to a 2010 study by Morris Kleiner (University of Minnesota) and Alan Krueger (Princeton). The burdens these licenses impose on would-be workers and entrepreneurs are substantial, as a study released this week by the Institute for Justice documents. "License to Work" collected licensure requirements for 102 low- and middle-income occupations—barber, massage therapist, auctioneer and interior designer, for instance—in the 50 states and the District of Columbia.
All 102 occupations are licensed in at least one state. These licenses force aspiring workers to spend an average of nine months in education or training, pass one exam, and pay more than $200 in fees. One third of the licenses take more than a year to get. These barriers make it harder for people—particularly minorities and those of lesser means and with less education—to find jobs and build new businesses that create jobs.
Every state needs reform, but some stand out. Louisiana licenses 71 of the 102 lower-income occupations, more than any other state. Hawaii's licensing requirements are the nation's most burdensome.
Arizona, however, imposes the heaviest combination of the number of licensed occupations (64) and the regulatory burdens (in time and money) required to secure them. Arizona is followed by California, Oregon, Nevada, Arkansas, Hawaii, Florida and Louisiana. In those eight states it takes, on average, one-and-a-half years of training, one exam and more than $300 to get a license.
Are all these regulatory barriers to entry really necessary to protect public safety or prevent consumers from shoddy work, as defenders of occupational licensure claim? Regulatory inconsistencies from state to state undermine this argument.
The vast majority of jobs we studied are done in one state or another by people without any government-issued license. Interior designers are licensed in just three states and the District of Columbia, for example, funeral attendants in only nine states, and shampooers in a mere five states. We know of no evidence that consumers in the remaining states demanded occupational licenses to protect them from an epidemic of dangerous shampooing.
License requirements often vary greatly. In five states, aspiring auctioneers must complete about a year or more of training—but only about nine days in Vermont and four days in Pennsylvania.
Is it plausible that cosmetologists need, on average, 10 times as many days to fulfill their educational and training requirements (372) than emergency medical technicians (33), who literally hold lives in their hands? That is the reality in most states. In fact, 66 occupations face greater average licensing burdens than EMTs.
The occupational licenses Mr. Snyder has slated for the chopping block are a diverse lot, including those for auctioneer, interior designer, community planner, security alarm contractor, and private security guard—several of which were included in our study. Reform will not be easy, as defenders of the status quo will undoubtedly play the safety card.
Take the response of the director of a barbering school in Michigan to a different proposal by a state legislator (not included in Mr. Snyder's proposal) to repeal barber licenses: "I'm not saying we are as important as doctors, but we are the closest you can get. We are turning this into the Wild, Wild West. . . . I'd like to see them get a haircut in a barber shop five years from now. It will be like rolling the dice."
The risk of a few bad haircuts seems worth a roll of the dice if the upside is more economic opportunities. But the truth is that consumers are capable of judging the quality of many services for themselves. If lawmakers in Michigan and elsewhere want to help more Americans find jobs, they should start by reducing or removing burdens that do little more than protect some people from competition by keeping others out of work.
Mr. Carpenter and Ms. Knepper are directors of strategic research at the Institute for Justice. For more information on their report, visit www.ij.org/LicenseToWork
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http://innovationandgrowth.wordpress.com/2011/06/10/federal-regulatory-jobs-outpace-private-sector/
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Obama Kills Welfare Reform
By DICK MORRIS
Published on TheHill.com on July 17, 2012
Printer-Friendly Version
Determined to destroy Bill Clinton's signature achievement, President Obama's administration has opened a loophole in the 1996 welfare reform legislation big enough to make the law ineffective. Its work requirement -- the central feature of the legislation -- has been diluted beyond recognition by the bureaucrats at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
On Thursday of last week, HHS issued regulations that modified -- gutted -- the work requirement. Its new regulations allow the states to substitute education programs for work to get welfare benefits. The regs say that "vocational educational training or job search/readiness programs" "count as well" in meeting the basic condition that recipients work in order to receive welfare benefits.
The Congress specifically prohibited the use of education or training to fulfill the requirement. When it passed welfare reform, Congress expressly limited the authority of the secretary of HHS to waive the work requirement.
The Heritage Foundation explains that:
"Section 415(a)(2)(B) of the welfare reform act, now codified at 42 U.S.C. § 615(a)(2)(B), expressly states that 'a waiver granted under section 1315 of this title [the one that HHS now claims it is acting under] or otherwise which relates to the provision of assistance under a State program funded under this part (as in effect on Sept. 30, 1996) shall not affect the applicability of section 607 of this title [which applies the work requirements] to the State.' In short, whatever else might be said of the scope of the waiver authority, the Secretary has no lawful authority to waive the work requirements of section 607, which is what HHS is contemplating in its Memorandum."
In the negotiations that preceded the passage of this landmark legislation -- in which I participated heavily -- then-Senate Republican Majority Leader Trent Lott (Miss.) was particularly suspicious that future HHS secretaries might dilute the work requirement, just as the administration has done. He worked overtime with counsel to make sure that education and training would not be used to substitute for the work provision. "I don't want anyone going to a truck drivers school that advertises on a matchbook cover and avoiding work," he told me. Now the administration has done just what Lott feared and the act prohibited.
Chairman of the House Republican Study Committee Jim Jordan (Ohio) rightly protested that the action is a "blatant violation of the law," and Mitt Romney has attacked it, saying "the linkage of work and welfare is essential to prevent welfare from becoming a way of life."
Heritage noted that "in the past, state bureaucrats have attempted to define activities such as hula dancing, attending Weight Watchers, and bed rest as 'work.' These dodges were blocked by the federal work standards. Now that the Obama administration has abolished those standards, we can expect 'work' in the TANF [welfare] program to mean anything but work."
And, of course, welfare reform has been one of the most successful programs enacted in recent decades. Under its provisions, the welfare population has been cut in half while child poverty -- until the current recession -- dropped by one-third.
The loosened requirements on what constitutes work are of a piece with Obama's strategy of expanding his political base by widening the dependency on government handouts. In 1980, 30 percent of all Americans received a payment from the government. In 2008, 44 percent did. Now the figure is 49 percent. At the same time, the number of working-age Americans who are out of work -- voluntarily or involuntarily -- has risen from 70 million in 2008 to 100 million today. Only 139 million are employed. We are rapidly becoming a nation that doesn't work, doesn't pay income taxes and gets entitlement checks.
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second post of the morning
Taking the King's Shilling
"I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it." --Benjamin Franklin
In yet another under-the-cover-of-darkness move, Hope-'n'-Changelings at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) abetted the Obama administration in pushing the limits of unconstitutional, executive-fiat government even further. This time, they quietly waived welfare work requirements for able-bodied individuals under a twisted reading of the Social Security Act. Ignoring both the letter and spirit of the original 1996 welfare-reform law while effectively establishing "new" law from the Oval Office, the move is entirely in keeping with the administration's selective enforcement of federal statutes and the imperial diktats of the Chosen One, who sponsored the policy change through his HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. This latest maneuver is simply one in an extended series that shows blatant disregard for Rule of Law and the Separation of Powers doctrine under the Constitution.
Recall that the Republican-led, Clinton-era welfare reform of the mid-1990s freed almost four million adults and three million children from the welfare plantation, halving welfare caseloads and childhood hunger while slowing out-of-wedlock childbirths. With this most recent welfare policy change, however, those days are effectively over. Witness now the return of the "Good Old Days," where virtually anyone is eligible for welfare handouts from an unlimited funding source, the U.S. Treasury (read: your tax dollars).
Why would the president do this? To make more people dependent on government, of course. Those dependents are thereby more likely to elect those who see government as the solution to every problem and who eschew individual freedom and initiative. Practically, this new edict means virtually anything amounts to "work" for the purposes of meeting able-bodied-work prerequisites under the program -- including bed rest and hula dancing (we wish we were kidding) -- thus entitling the qualifying recipient to endless welfare largesse.
Never mind the fact that Congress specifically proscribed waiver authority from the work prerequisite, because Congress didn't want no-load deadbeats on the government dole. While the rest of Planet Earth would consider these Executive Branch end-runs clear violations of the law, Barack Obama calls this "working with Congress." Congress says "no," and the Imperial Leader says, "We can't wait" -- "we" meaning him, of course -- and does it anyway, without a law authorizing his action. His acts are literally law-less.
But no matter. The important thing is that this new "law" reflects what Obama would have it reflect: free money for those who want it and are willing to not work to "earn" it. Also, pay no attention to the fact that growth in welfare spending has eclipsed growth in all other spending, including Social Security, Medicare, education and defense. Nothing to see here -- move along. The "good" news is that with a current debt of $16 trillion, the Obamanites wish to add "only" $13 trillion in new debt through welfare spending over the next decade.
Meanwhile, November looms, and along with it a fundamental question: What kind of country will America be? Are we to be like our European brethren, collectivist-minded and state-dependent? Or are we to be a people more like the Framers envisioned: independent-minded, respecting of Rule of Law and jealously protective of our fundamental freedoms? As the saying goes, "If you take the king's shilling, you become the king's servant." In November, we as a nation will decide whether we want to keep making it easier to take the king's shilling. We should choose wisely: Our liberty and our way of life depend on it.
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smaller Larger
By STEPHEN MOORE
Republicans have charged that the decision last week by the Department of Health and Human Services to grant waivers to states from the work-for-welfare requirement is not just terrible public policy but also illegal.
Last week Dave Camp, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, and Orrin Hatch, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, wrote to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius asking her to cite where the agency has this authority. Legal experts at the Heritage Foundation and inside Congress believe that the work requirement is not waivable under the 1996 welfare law.
The HHS letter responding to the lawmakers simply asserted the waiver power without any concrete evidence. As one Senate staffer explains, "it was pretty pathetic." Mr. Camp says that "if this administration wants to have the authority to waive work requirements, they should submit a legislative proposal to Congress to change the law, and not attempt to do so by administrative fiat." Mr. Hatch was equally agitated, ridiculing the HHS letter as "a dodge and a deflection."
Newt Gingrich, who was House speaker when welfare reform passed, told me that "we wrote this law so that states could not avoid the work requirements for welfare."
The White House maintains that a number of Republican states wanted the waivers for flexibility and isn't backing down. But this could be a political loser for the White House since polls show strong support for the work requirements. If this legal fight remains unresolved in the weeks ahead, the GOP may challenge the White House in court. Stay tuned.
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For all the negotiations and struggles with welfare reform that went with getting a Dem President and an R congress to finally agree on specifics after two vetoes and many re-writes (http://nwcitizen.us/oldsite/usa/welfare-reform.html), now one side can unilaterally change the law? Because of what, our the new government by Czar? Which article authorizes that?
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Allow me to suggest that it is not "one side" but rather "one branch".
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It's not every day that a federal regulator worries about American taxpayers, so let's hear it for the Federal Housing Finance Agency's Edward DeMarco. On Tuesday the man who oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac again refused to let the toxic twins forgive more housing debt.
For months, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and other officials have leaned on Mr. DeMarco to let Fan and Fred write down mortgages for troubled borrowers, many of whose homes are "underwater," or worth less than what they owe. The House Financial Services Committee requested a financial analysis of the proposal, and Mr. DeMarco revealed the results Tuesday.
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Acting Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency Edward DeMarco
.He estimates that 74,000 to 248,000 borrowers could be eligible for such a writedown under an expanded Home Affordable Modification Program. The problem is that once government helps a few homeowners, others may "claim a hardship or actually become delinquent to capture the benefits of principal forgiveness." A few thousand such borrowers could wipe out any benefits the program might offer. The regulatory agency also worries about the cost and time involved in implementing the program and notes that 80% of the underwater borrowers are still current on mortgage payments.
Fan and Fred have already modified 1.1 million loans since 2008 and completed another million "foreclosure prevention" actions, using short sales, deeds-in-lieu and more. The policy problem isn't Mr. DeMarco's agency. The slow pace of economic recovery and the stream of housing bailouts the Obama Administration has rolled out have prevented the market from finding a bottom.
The political pressure to conform in Washington can be extreme, especially for a career civil servant who wants to keep doing important work. Which is all the more reason to salute Mr. DeMarco's fortitude.
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page 11
A version of this article appeared August 1, 2012, on page A12 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A Model Bureaucrat.
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http://www.officer.com/news/10773132/ice-chief-of-staff-resigns-amid-misconduct-claims?utm_source=Officer.com+Newsday+E-Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=CPS120828004
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Speech of the Year
A regulator, of all people, shows how complex regulations contributed to the financial crisis..
While Americans were listening to the bloviators in Tampa and Charlotte, the speech of the year was delivered at the Federal Reserve's annual policy conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming on August 31. And not by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. The orator of note was a regulator from the Bank of England, and his subject was "The dog and the frisbee."
In a presentation that deserves more attention, BoE Director of Financial Stability Andrew Haldane and colleague Vasileios Madouros point the way toward the real financial reform that Washington has never enacted. The authors marshal compelling evidence that as regulation has become more complex, it has also become less effective. They point out that much of the reason large banks are so difficult for regulators to comprehend is because regulators themselves have created complicated metrics that can't provide accurate measurements of a bank's health.
The paper's title refers to the fact that border collies can often catch frisbees better than people, because the dogs by necessity have to keep it simple. But the impulse of regulators, if asked to catch a frisbee, would be to encourage the construction of long equations related to wind speed and frisbee rotation that they likely wouldn't even understand.
Readers will recall how ineffective the Basel II international banking standards were at ensuring the health of investment banks like Bear Stearns. The inspector general of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which adopted the Basel standards in 2004, would report in 2008 that Bear remained compliant with these rules even as it was about to be rescued.
Messrs. Haldane and Madouros looked broadly at the pre-crisis financial industry, and specifically at a sample of 100 large global banks at the end of 2006. What they found was that a firm's leverage ratio—the amount of equity capital it held relative to its assets—was a fairly good predictor of which banks ended up sailing into the rocks in 2008. Banks with more capital tended to be sturdier.
But the definition of what constitutes capital was also critical, and here simpler is also better. Basel's "Tier 1" regulatory capital ratio was thought to be more precise because it assigned "risk weights" to each category of assets and required banks to perform millions of complex calculations. Yet it was hardly of any use in predicting disasters at too-big-to-fail banks.
We've argued that Basel II relied far too much on the judgments of government-anointed credit-rating agencies, plus a catastrophic bias in favor of mortgages as "safe." Instead of learning from that mistake, the gnomes have written into the new Basel III rules a dangerous bias in favor of sovereign debt. The growing complexity of the rules leaves more room for banks to pursue regulatory arbitrage, identifying assets that can be classified as safe, at least for compliance purposes.
Messrs. Haldane and Madouros also describe the larger problem: a belief among regulators that models can capture all necessary information and then accurately predict future risk. This belief is new, and not helpful. As the authors note, "Many of the dominant figures in 20th century economics—from Keynes to Hayek, from Simon to Friedman—placed imperfections in information and knowledge centre-stage. Uncertainty was for them the normal state of decision-making affairs."
A deadly flaw in financial regulation is the assumption that a few years or even a few decades of market data can allow models to accurately predict worst-case scenarios. The authors suggest that hundreds or even a thousand years of data might be needed before we could trust the Basel machinery.
Despite its failures, that machinery becomes larger and larger. As Messrs. Haldane and Madouros note, "Einstein wrote that: 'The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them.' Yet the regulatory response to the crisis has largely been based on the level of thinking that created it. The Tower of Basel, like its near-namesake the Tower of Babel, continues to rise."
Exploding the myth that regulatory agencies are underfunded, they note that in both the U.K. and U.S. the number of regulators has for decades risen faster than the number of people employed in finance.
Complexity grows still faster. The authors report that in the 12 months after the passage of Dodd-Frank, rule-making that represents a mere 10% of the expected total will impose more than 2.2 million hours of annual compliance work on private business. Recent history suggests that if anything this will make another crisis more likely.
Here's a better idea: Raise genuine capital standards at banks and slash regulatory budgets in Washington. Abandon the Basel rules on "risk-weighting" and other fantasies of regulatory omniscience. In financial regulation, as in so many other areas of life, simpler is better.
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Obama’s Regulatory Cliff Draws Near
Posted By Arnold Ahlert On December 27, 2012 @ www.frontpagemag.com
Many Americans believe the biggest problem the nation currently faces is the so-called fiscal cliff. Unfortunately, the fiscal cliff is nothing compared to the avalanche of new regulations that will be coming in 2013. That Americans remain unaware of this ominous development is understandable. The most transparent administration in history ignored the provisions of the Regulatory Flexibility Act and a subsequent series of executive orders that require the semi-annual release of all regulations under development or review by some 60 departments, agencies, and commissions. Thus, the April 2012 and October 2012 deadlines came and went without compliance. Now that the election is over, Americans will discover just how all-encompassing Obama and his big-government zealots intend to be.
The scope is staggering. According to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the overall regulatory burden has reached $1.8 trillion annually, and $215.4 billion in compliance costs have been added in 2012 alone. The OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs website reveals that 4,100 new regulations are in the pipeline, with more than 400 aimed at small businesses, whose compliance costs will exceed those of their larger competitors by 36 percent.
Unsurprisingly, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will be taking the lead role in flexing the administration’s regulatory muscles. Proposals to significantly expand the Clean Water Act will give the EPA power over virtually every body of water in the nation, including farm ponds, streams, and even storm water runoff, all of which could seriously impact family farmers and small businesses. More restrictive requirements for controlling ozone emissions could cost $90 billion annually and trigger the potential loss of millions of jobs. The designation of coal ash as a “hazardous substance” will substantially increase energy costs, adding another $79 billion to $110 billion to the regulatory tab, and eliminating thousands of jobs in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Missouri, and Ohio. A new rule that tightens allowable levels of so-called fine particulate matter will be added to the mix as well, making it far harder for local governments to issue new manufacturing permits.
Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), who had demanded the Obama administration comply with the law regarding the release of regulations and was ignored, released a list of ominous new rules compiled by his Senate committee on Environment and Public Works, including Greenhouse Gas Regulations that “will cost more than $300 to $400 billion a year, and significantly raise the price of gas at the pump and energy in the home” and affect “not just coal plants” but “churches, schools, restaurants, hospitals and farms [that] will eventually be regulated.” Inhofe further reveals these requirements are “so strict they virtually eliminate coal as a fuel option for future electric power generation.”
Adding to Americans’ misery is a large number of proposed regulations that were piling up at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) before the election as well. 78 percent of the 151 regulations awaiting review had been pending for more than 90 days, once again exceeding the maximum time allowed by law. Several of the most costly include a Department of Transportation rule requiring rear-view camera and video displays for all new cars and trucks, at an estimated cost of up to $2.7 billion; stricter limits on industrial and commercial boilers and incinerators that could run as high as $20 billion in costs; energy conservation standards for walk-in coolers, freezers and commercial refrigeration, applying to virtually all equipment used in retail food stores, increasing manufacturing costs by $500 million over four years; and Department of Labor restrictions on worker exposure to crystalline silica common in mining, manufacturing and construction jobs, costing $5.5 billion, as well as inducing a loss of $3.1 billion of economic output on an annual basis. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is also joining the frenzy, aiming to implement long-delayed regulations requiring automakers to include event data recorders, aka “black boxes,” in all new cars and light trucks beginning in 2014.
Then there is the Frank-Dodd financial reform law. Although it was written almost two-and-a-half years ago, the 2300 page behemoth, with at least 400 separate rules affecting virtually the entire financial sector, had failed to meet 63 percent of its own deadlines as of July 2, 2012. As a result, thousands of businesses, already reeling from the uncertainty of the fiscal cliff, are dealing with more uncertainty here as well, having no idea what they must do to be in compliance. Despite the idea that the law was ostensibly written to address the financial crisis of 2007-2008, many of its provisions are completely unrelated to it.
Yet in keeping with this administration’s “never let a crisis go to waste” mentality, Dodd-Frank offered the administration yet another opportunity to expand the size and scope of government. These include vast new powers granted to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the regulatory authority for credit and debit cards, mortgages, student loans, savings and checking accounts, and most other consumer financial products and services. The CFPB’s power is further enhanced by the reality that it is immune to congressional control, because its funding is now a fixed portion of the Federal Reserve’s budget.
Dodd-Frank also expands government authority to seize control of firms that regulators designate as failing and, unlike bankruptcy proceedings, the process is not supervised by a court and grants only limited judicial review, raising the possibility that government can illegally seize property in violation of the Constitution. Other regulations will impact consumer credit, result in higher service fees and, as financial institutions are forced to pay for regulatory compliance officers and attorneys, money that would otherwise be loaned for mortgages and new businesses will be tied up.
Other parts of Dodd-Frank yet to be finalized are rules for such items as living wills, capital requirements and proprietary trading restriction for banks and other financial institutions, along with possible court challenges that would most likely hinge on whether a rule can withstand a cost-benefit analysis. In short, businesses and financial institutions expected to lead the nation in growth and job creation will be flying blind–meaning they will most likely wait and see what Congress does before expanding, or adding new employees.
The other 800-pound gorilla with loads of uncertainty attached to it, even as it begins to affect Americans in 2013, is Obamacare. It wasn’t until right after the election that Americans learned they will be paying a $63 fee to offset what the administration concedes will be a massive disruption in the insurance markets, courtesy of new healthcare requirements. Yet this is nothing compared to the 13,000 pages of federal ObamaCare regulations that still don’t fully address how the maze of new programs will operate. Many Americans are already aware that several companies are cutting back on employees and/or employee hours to avoid the mandate that requires companies with 50 full-time employees to pay their healthcare, or pay a fine. Yet the law is so confusing it took a whopping 18 pages of gov-speak to define a full-time employee. Equally vague are the regulations states must follow to set up health care exchanges, so much so that even those that support the process don’t know how to proceed. Health insurance companies also remain in the dark regarding what benefits must be covered and at what price so they can design and price their policies, develop marketing materials that meet yet-to-be-announced government specifications, and deal with a seeming endless maze of other calculations.
Once again, many of the new regulations were approved as early as last May by the Health and Human Services Department (HHS), yet kept from the public until after the election. Such surreptitiousness produced an embarrassing moment for 18 Democratic senators and senators-elect, who “discovered” the bill they had voted for or supported contained a job-killing $28 billion tax on medical device sales.
Yet the most ominous aspect of Obamacare is the power it confers on the Secretary of Health and Human Services, a position currently held by Kathleen Sebelius. The American Spectator’s Philip Klein gave Americans a hint in 2010. The new healthcare law “finds that there are more than 700 instances in which the Secretary is instructed that she ‘shall’ do something, and more than 200 cases in which she ‘may’ take some form of regulatory action if she chooses. On 139 occasions, the law mentions decisions that the ‘Secretary determines,’” he writes. As a result Sebelius can “determine what type of insurance coverage every American is required to have. She can influence what hospitals can participate in certain plans, can set up health insurance exchanges within states against their will, and even regulate McDonald’s Happy Meals. She’ll run pilot programs that Democrats have set up in an effort to control costs, and be in a position to dole out billions of dollars in grant money.”
In short, one could make a reasonable argument that a healthcare bureaucrat is the most powerful woman in the nation.
Other than the details of the regulations themselves, none of this should surprise anyone. This president and his party have made it very clear they will spare no effort to insert government into the lives of Americans wherever possible, even testing the limits of the Constitution to do so. The avalanche of new regulations, piled on top the hundreds of thousands of those that already exist, is further testament to a progressive ideology that has taken the concept of government by, for and of the people and turned it on its head. Now more than ever Americans are expected to serve government, not the other way around.
Sadly, a substantial number of Americans don’t mind, having bought into a devil’s bargain of entitlements and handouts aimed at convincing them such an odious tradeoff is reasonable. Yet the words of former President Gerald Ford ring truer than ever: “A government big enough to give you everything you need, is a government big enough to take away everything that you have.”
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/dec/31/epas-illegal-human-experiments-could-break-nurembe/
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http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/01/03/virginia-judge-rules-epa-overstepped-authority-trying-to-regulate-water-as/
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/01/03/obama-administration-delivers-delayed-regulatory-agenda-could-cost-billions/#ixzz2GyjMvN00
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http://foxnewsinsider.com/2013/01/07/ny-post-investigation-finds-welfare-recipients-taking-out-cash-at-bars-liquor-stores-and-strip-clubs/
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http://foxnewsinsider.com/2013/01/07/ny-post-investigation-finds-welfare-recipients-taking-out-cash-at-bars-liquor-stores-and-strip-clubs/
True and perfectly legal within our misguided programs. They send buses to the neighborhoods around welfare payday with free transportation to the casinos. Also the drug trade and weapons to support it as well expressed recently. In-kind payments like food stamps are converted to cash everyday in places like North Minneapolis and Southside Chicago for 50 cents on the dollar for things like booze, cigarettes and lottery or gambling. The loser is the American taxpayer. Everyone else is a willing participant.
Money should only be given out within the confines of a written and monitored plan - for all spending and getting off of assistance if possible.
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Seems like a strange idea until you admit it is all political already. Replace a sole administrator with a commission that argues policy, rulings and regulations openly and registers the minority dissent publicly. I love the ending, if you think this is a small change, try proposing it and watch the uproar.
In today's WSJ, excerpt from Powerline:
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/01/politicize-the-epa.php
There is a reason Congress has adopted the commission model. While a bipartisan consensus exists for regulating some parts of the economy by independent agencies that harness specialized expertise, there remains an underlying partisan disagreement about the means and ends of policy. The commission model recognizes and accommodates these disagreements, with a process that emphasizes public debate and is more transparent and accountable.
The EPA’s single-administrator model, on the other hand, is based on what amounts to a conceit that some policy matters are beyond politics or meaningful controversy. This is the apotheosis of the Progressive Era ideal, or rather myth, of enlightened administration by neutral experts. It is also a tactic to deny that what are deeply political administrative decisions are in fact political. The single-administrator model makes it much easier for an ideologue like Ms. Jackson to use the regulatory process as a steamroller to achieve policy goals.
A bipartisan commission would change this dynamic. The president would, as is customary, still appoint a majority of the commissioners, including the chairman. But the minority would have their dissent on policy matters on the record.
...
If you think reforming the EPA into a five-member commission is a modest reform of little consequence, here’s a suggestion. Have House Republicans introduce a bill to do this, and watch how ferociously the environmental establishment fights it.
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That is a very interesting idea.
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I wonder how it would affect this?
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"Georgia Power ... announced this week that it is asking state regulators for permission to shut down 15 electrical generating units -- the closure of four power plants in all. The utility company says new regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency -- known as the Utility MACT rule -- will simply make the plants too expensive to run. The regulations in question are intended to reduce the amount of mercury released into the air. But in fact, they have every appearance of being a back-door attempt to regulate carbon emissions -- precisely the kind of scheme that then-Sen. Barack Obama had in mind when he acknowledged in 2008 that 'electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket' under his energy plan. The 15 units that Georgia Power wants to shutter -- all but two of which are fired by coal or oil -- have a combined capacity of 2,061 megawatts, or enough to provide power for roughly 1.5 million homes. The company plans to close 11 of them on April 16, 2015, the exact day the EPA's new mercury regulations are scheduled to take effect. ... The EPA has claimed that its new mercury regulation will produce $140 billion in annual economic benefits. Apparently, those benefits will not be going to the 480 power plant workers in Georgia who now stand to lose their jobs. Then there are the millions of Georgia energy consumers who will soon see higher rates and higher bills. More broadly, the National Association of Manufacturers estimates that this single rule will kill 1.65 million jobs nationwide through 2020.... Even taken at face value, the EPA's claims of economic benefits are highly doubtful. In fact, the reductions to mercury are expected to produce only a tiny sliver of that $140 billion benefit -- just $6 million of it, in fact. But it will cost so much money to comply with these rules and produce this minuscule benefit that many plants will simply be closed instead. ... Obama also said in 2008 that 'if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It's just that it'll bankrupt them.' He seems to be making this come true, even without the carbon cap-and-trade system he once envisioned." --The Washington Examiner
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324081704578237722576889786.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
Roger Kimball: This Metamorphosis Will Require a Permit
Sandy wrecked our house, but bureaucrats are keeping it broken.
Article
By ROGER KIMBALL
"What sort of people were these? What were they talking about? What office did they belong to? K. was living in a free country, after all, everywhere was at peace, all laws were decent and were upheld, who was it who dared accost him in his own home?"
—Franz Kafka, "The Trial"
Like many people whose houses were badly damaged by Hurricane Sandy, my family and I have been living in a rented house since the storm. Unlike some whose houses were totalled, we could have repaired things and been home toasting our tootsies by our own fireplace by now. What happened?
Two things: zoning (as in "Twilight Zone") and FEMA.
Our first exposure to the town zoning authorities came a couple of weeks after Sandy. We'd met with insurance adjusters, contractors and "remediation experts." We'd had about a foot of Long Island Sound sloshing around the ground floor of our house in Connecticut, and everyone had the same advice: Rip up the floors and subfloors, and tear out anything—wiring, plumbing, insulation, drywall, kitchen cabinets, bookcases—touched by salt water. All of it had to go, and pronto, too, lest mold set in.
Yet it wasn't until the workmen we hired had ripped apart most of the first floor that the phrase "building permit" first wafted past us. Turns out we needed one. "What, to repair our own house we need a building permit?"
Of course.
Before you could get a building permit, however, you had to be approved by the Zoning Authority. And Zoning—citing FEMA regulations—would force you to bring the house "up to code," which in many cases meant elevating the house by several feet. Now, elevating your house is very expensive and time consuming—not because of the actual raising, which takes just a day or two, but because of the required permits.
s
Austrian writer Franz Kafka in 1910.
Kafka would have liked the zoning folks. There also is a limit on how high in the sky your house can be. That calculation seems to be a state secret, but it can easily happen that raising your house violates the height requirement. Which means that you can't raise the house that you must raise if you want to repair it. Got that?
There were other surprises. A woman in our neighborhood has two adjoining properties, with a house and a cottage. She rents the house and lives in the cottage. For 29 years she has paid taxes on both. The cottage was severely damaged but she can't tear it down and rebuild because Zoning says the plots are not zoned for two structures, never mind that for 29 years two property-tax payments were gladly accepted.
Kafka would have liked FEMA, too. We've met plenty of its agents. Every one we've encountered has been polite and oozing with sympathy. Even the lady who reduced my wife to tears was nice. The issue was my wife's proof of income. We sent our tax return to FEMA, but that wasn't good enough. They wanted pay stubs. My wife works as a freelance writer and editor. She doesn't get a pay stub. Which apparently makes her a nonperson to this government agency.
In "The Road to Serfdom," Friedrich Hayek noted that "the power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest functionnaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work."
And how. But what makes the phenomenon so insidious is that many of the functionaries are as friendly as can be. It's just that they're cogs in a machine whose overriding purpose is not service but self-perpetuation and control.
It is, as Alexis de Tocqueville saw, a recipe for a form of despotism peculiar to modern democracies. It does this, wrote Tocqueville, by enforcing "a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules" that reduces citizens "to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd." The sobering thought is that we're all complicit in that infantilization. After all, we keep voting for the politicians who put this leviathan in place.
Just before Christmas, our 5-year-old daughter had an encounter with Santa. What did she want for Christmas? "My house back."
It's not only us, of course. Thousands upon thousands have been displaced, but the bullying pedantry of the zoning establishment never wavers. While our house stands empty, the city authorities even showed a sense of humor by sending us a bill for property taxes. For a house they won't let us repair.
We've spent a few thousand dollars on a lawyer to appeal to Zoning, many thousands in rent, and hundreds getting a fresh appraisal of our house. The latest from our lawyer: Because of our new appraisal, we may be able to "apply for a zoning permit." "Apply," mind you.
I used to think that our house was, you know, our house. The bureaucrats have taught me otherwise. But then I also used to think that Franz Kafka wrote a species of dark fantasy. I know now that he was turning out nonfiction.
Mr. Kimball is the author, most recently, of "The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia" (St. Augustine's, 2012).
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http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/great-moments-in-state-govt-bureaucrats-threaten-family-for-rescuing-bambi/
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/02/09/handicapped-woman-refuses-smart-meter-has-power-cut-in-the-dead-of-winter/
Good work by Gov. Kasich here.
Also, I gather there are some snooping issues with the smart meters. Can anyone here bring us up to speed?
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Economic Fascism in action. For intellectual clarity, do note that this changes the inferences to be drawn from the gasoline price rise with regard to inflation.
The Ethanol Gas-Pump Surcharge
A 2007 mandate is needlessly raising U.S. Gasoline prices.
With gas prices above $4 a gallon in many parts of the U.S., consumers have a right to know why. Crude oil prices have fallen by 1% since the end of February even as gas prices are up 12%, according to an analysis by Reuters. So higher oil prices aren't the answer. Blame this one, at least in part, on Washington and ethanol.
This story dates to 2007 when the Bush Administration joined Democratic greens and corn-state Republicans to pass an energy bill mandating renewable fuel standards. The law required a 10% ethanol blend in all gasoline and established annual mandates for how much ethanol the oil and gas industry must purchase each year through 2022.
This year refiners and importers are required to blend 13.8 billion gallons of ethanol into the nation's gasoline, rising to 14.4 billion next year. The EPA allocates a share of this mandate to oil and gas companies, and to monitor compliance each gallon of ethanol is assigned a 38 digit Renewable Identification Number, or RIN.
The problem is that Washington's seers were wildly wrong about how much gas Americans would keep putting in their tanks. In 2007 annual gasoline consumption was about 140 billion gallons per year, with forecasts of rising demand. But the 2008-09 recession and better fuel economy have lowered consumption to an estimated 135 billion gallons.
Refiners are now crashing into what is called a "blend wall," meaning the feds have forced them to purchase more ethanol than they can safely put in their gasoline. Refiners are reluctant to blend more than 10% ethanol into gasoline because consumers don't want it, and because a higher blend can damage the engines of older cars, boats and electrical equipment.
Refiners must therefore purchase RIN credits from companies that have used more ethanol than required. But the credits are running out, and so the price of RINs has soared to nearly $1 a gallon, up from about seven cents at the start of the year. According to Darrel Good, a University of Illinois agriculture economist, the RIN price "could continue to rise as we approach the higher ethanol mandate for 2014" as credits run out. These costs are mostly passed on to motorists.
Refiners are also getting around the renewable fuels mandate by shipping refined gasoline abroad, because exported gasoline is exempt from the ethanol requirement. So even as domestic gasoline prices have soared, refiners are increasing their exports, and that too has contributed to higher prices.
The fix here is obvious. The EPA has the authority to revise the ethanol requirements, and if it did so tomorrow the price of gas would quickly fall by about five to 10 cents a gallon. If EPA won't act, Congress can and should suspend the ethanol blending mandate to give motorists a break.
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page 16
A version of this article appeared March 12, 2013, on page A16 in the U.S. Edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Ethanol Gas-Pump Surcharge.
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Go Simple
By CASS R. SUNSTEIN
Published: April 13, 2013 85 Comments
HOW many millions of hours do you think Americans spend on government paperwork every year?
The answer is staggering. It is measured not in the millions of hours, but in the billions — 9.14 of them, to be exact. Suppose that we value one hour at $20 (a conservative estimate). If so, the government imposes an annual reporting cost of more than $180 billion on the American people. That figure is more than 20 times last year’s budget of the Environmental Protection Agency, more than seven times that of the Department of Agriculture, and more than six times that of the Department of State.
Large as they are, the numbers do not capture the frustration experienced by countless individuals and small businesses, which are required to grapple with long, complex and sometimes barely comprehensible forms. Dozens of government agencies impose significant paperwork burdens, but one stands above all others: the Department of the Treasury. That department accounts for 6.7 billon annual hours, which is nearly 75 percent of the total. No other agency accounts for more than 6 percent. The Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Labor, the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency impose big reporting burdens, but in each of these cases, we are speaking of millions of hours, not billions.
The Treasury Department is the national paperwork champion for one reason: It houses the Internal Revenue Service. As Congress starts to explore tax reform, it should begin with a project that ought to attract bipartisan support: a focused effort to slash the immense paperwork burden imposed by government in general and the tax system in particular.
There is reason to be hopeful. From 2009 to 2012, I led the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which oversees the Paperwork Reduction Act. (Yes, there is such a thing.) As part of President Obama’s continuing effort to streamline regulatory requirements, we took a series of quiet but aggressive steps to cut pointless red tape. In the last decade, the estimated paperwork burden peaked between 2007 and 2009, and while it remains far too high, we were able to chip away at it.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is not exactly famous for eliminating regulatory costs, but in 2011 it removed 1.9 million annual hours of unnecessary burdens imposed on employers. In 2012, the Department of Transportation saved truck drivers 1.6 million annual hours by eliminating a requirement to file redundant inspection reports. The Department of Education has undertaken a series of efforts to simplify the process for filing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, removing 5.4 million annual hours of burdens imposed on students and their families.
More ambitiously still, government agencies recently identified more than 100 new paperwork-reduction initiatives, which are anticipated to eliminate some 100 million hours in annual burdens.
IN the area of taxation, Congress has imposed a lot of reporting requirements, sharply reducing the ability of the I.R.S. to streamline the system. And yet the I.R.S. has taken important steps to simplify the annual tax process. Its form 1040EZ allows people earning less than $100,000 to file their taxes with a straightforward one-page form.
The I.R.S. has also announced a far simpler way to assess the popular home-office deduction. More than three million taxpayers claim this deduction, which has long been time-consuming to calculate. The new approach is eliminating 1.6 million hours in annual burdens. Moreover, the I.R.S.’s ambitious initiative to simplify reporting for capital gains and losses, recently announced though not yet implemented, will allow taxpayers to report summary information without providing unnecessary line-by-line details for each transaction — saving 19 million hours in annual reporting burdens.
Still, the I.R.S. could do far more. It could encourage many more taxpayers to take advantage of its current efforts to allow them to substitute electronic filings for paper ones. It could increase the use of shorter, streamlined forms (some of these are already available), and it could coordinate and consolidate redundant or overlapping requirements.
Some economists, including Austan Goolsbee, a former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, have proposed a more ambitious plan: Tax authorities should allow automatic tax returns. They would use the information they already have to send eligible taxpayers fully filled out returns, asking for only a signature and the correction of any errors. California is already using such an approach with a program called Ready Return.
For all the talk about tax simplification, Congress has paid disappointingly little attention to paperwork burdens. But Democrats and Republicans should be able to agree that nine billion hours are far too many. Let’s do something about it.
Cass R. Sunstein is a former head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and the author, most recently, of “Simpler: The Future of Government.”
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Yeah - pretty shocking he would write such a thing. But then again - notice he isn't even discussing scrapping the present tax code and replacing it, which is what has to be done. There is no "fixing" the present system.
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Perhaps even more to the point is that this is the man who believes in the power of the state to "nudge" we the unwilling into state-desired behaviors.
This is the guy who Glenn Beck called "the second most dangerous man in America".
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Yes, I'm well-aware of this man's predilection for controlling others' behavior. He's a true Marxist in that sense. Believes that man can create utopia on this earth, if only the right government polices are enacted. The very essence of the difference between conservatives and leftists.
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http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/story/2013/05/31/wdr-moore-tornado-relief-us-border.html
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323734304578542981761557180.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
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The Founders didn't quite anticipate the imperial bureaucracy
Published by: Dan Calabrese
Our masters.
First of all, I wish someone could explain to me how Beltway conventional wisdom declares a shallow hack like Ezra Klein "bright," but doesn't recognize the real brainpower in Jay Cost. If you read the Weekly Standard at all, you know Cost for being thorough, analytical and always honest in his assessments. And as we see here, he does his homework and knows his history. Cost has done a really excellent piece that spells out one of the biggest problems facing the citizens of this nation - the fact that a gigantic bureaucracy the Founders could never have anticipated, and really designed no mechanism for reining in, has become such a power unto itself.
Here is the money passage:
The Declaration of Independence vested all sovereign power in the people alone, while the Constitution established a government to manage that power in a republican fashion. While the people still swear fealty to the founding ideals, they have not put much thought recently into the problems the Founders tackled. As society has become more complex, the government has, too; Americans have not reexamined the structure of government, in an age in which it accounts for more than 20 percent of the national economy, to ensure it still reflects the republican spirit. In fact, there has not been a serious public discussion about the organization of the bureaucracy since the 1880s, even as it has doubled in size many times over. And so today, it is a vast enterprise of millions of workers, with precious little oversight from the people’s elected representatives.
It’s no wonder that some agency somewhere in the bureaucracy could have worked so perniciously for so long against the people’s interests. Perhaps the only surprise is that we ever noticed the malfeasance at the IRS at all. Were it not for the over-the-top questioning from the IRS—asking one group to pledge not to protest abortion clinics, another to reveal what books their members were reading, another to say what they’re praying about—all this might still be hidden in the shadows, unbeknownst to an overburdened Congress and an incurious media. And it remains to be seen what will be done about it, whether the bureaucracy, now under attack, has the resources and wherewithal to block oversight and prevent reform.
If there is a battle between the people and the bureaucracy to see who will maintain power, the bureaucracy has a huge advantage because it knows the inside picture, knows where the bodies are buried and knows how to lay hold of the public's resources. Elected officials are theoretically responsive to the voters, but the truth is they know the bureaucracy can make more trouble for them on any given day than some constituent.
The IRS is far from the only bad actor here. We've all heard stories of the excesses at the EPA, and the truth is few really know what goes on in a broad sense within every little agency of the federal government. Even Obama's defenders - in a strange manner of defending him - acknowledge that the government is too big for anyone to really keep tabs on what it's doing.
Congress could pass reforms that would make the bureaucracy more accountable, which would most certainly mean it would have to be smaller, but if Congress tries, you know the greatest resistance will come from the bureaucracy itself and its champions in Congress.
This is a fight that needs to be waged at some point. I'm not sure how to fight it, and I don't see anyone willing to lead it. But someone needs to.
Follow all of Dan's work, including his series of Christian spiritual warfare novels, by liking his page on Facebook.
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second post
Money to burn
The muddle-headed world of American public-pension accounting
SLOWLY but surely the cost of America’s public-sector pension promises is becoming clear. Last year the best estimate of the shortfall was more than $4 trillion. To deal with its deficit, a giant Californian pension fund, CalPERS, recently announced plans that will increase contributions by employers (in effect, taxpayers) by up to a half, starting in 2015-16.
Final-salary pension costs have risen for decades because workers are living longer and the retirement age has barely budged. The bill was disguised in the 1980s and 1990s by good asset returns. But dismal equity markets have since forced many private providers to close final-salary schemes to new members and switch to less lavish defined-contribution plans.
This shift has hardly happened in the public sector, in large part because the accounting treatment is so different. Devin Nunes, a Republican congressman, recently revived a bill to move to a more conservative accounting approach.
Failing to recognise the true cost of public pensions builds up all sorts of problems, as an academic paper last year made clear. As pension funds become more mature (i.e., more of their members are retired) their asset allocation should, in theory, become more conservative. After all, the fund has to worry more about paying benefits immediately and has less scope to gamble that riskier assets will deliver long-term growth.
Sure enough, mature pension funds in Canada and Europe and in America’s private sector all follow this approach. But more mature American public plans have riskier portfolios than less mature equivalents. In its latest “Global Financial Stability Report” the IMF worried that American funds had increased the riskiness of their portfolios, “exposing them to greater volatility and liquidity risks”.
The explanation for such Behaviour is not hard to find. American public-sector schemes discount their liabilities by the expected return on their assets. The riskier the asset mix, the higher the assumed return—and the lower the bill appears to be.
This is an odd way of thinking. Suppose a car company borrowed $10 billion in the form of a 20-year bond to build a manufacturing plant and planned to pay off the debt with the profits from running the plant. The car company will assume a higher return on capital than its financing cost (otherwise it should not build the plant). But it still has to recognise the $10 billion bond liability on its balance-sheet. It cannot say it owes only $2 billion because it expects a very high return.
The reason is clear. If the plant fails to earn a high return, the firm will still be liable to repay the bond. Similarly, if pension schemes fail to earn a high return on their assets, they still have to pay benefits. Final-salary pensions are a debt-like liability.
When private-sector companies account for their pension schemes, therefore, they discount liabilities with a corporate-bond yield. Lower yields have pushed up liabilities and led to big deficits. Moody’s, a ratings agency, will in future use a long-term bond yield to discount American public-pension schemes, resulting in much larger liabilities than before.
Even if you use the expected-return methodology, the discount rate used by public-sector pension funds should fall. That is because all pension funds tend to own some bonds, and low bond yields mean low future returns. But the paper finds no link at all between the discount rates used by public-sector funds and the level of bond yields.
The motto seems to be: if reality is challenging, just ignore it.
The Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) did change the rules for public pension funds last year. But the revised rules still throw up absurdities. In a paper for theFinancial Analysts Journal, Robert Novy-Marx of the University of Rochester argues that by destroying assets invested in cash a scheme can reduce its deficit by increasing the expected return on remaining assets. “A plan can sometimes improve its funding status by literally burning money,” he remarks.
This seemed such a startling finding that The Economist asked GASB to comment. Instead of a detailed rebuttal, we received this response: “GASB gave serious consideration to the views of Professor Novy-Marx when developing its new pension standards.” Not serious enough, it seems. American taxpayers must not know whether to laugh or cry.
Economist.com/blogs/buttonwood
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The low information voters are in for a bad time when the bills finally come due.
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The low information voters are in for a bad time when the bills finally come due.
Detroit To Dump Retiree Health Costs On ObamaCare
By JED GRAHAM, INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 09:18 AM ET
The federal government isn't among the creditors Detroit has turned to for mercy, but U.S. taxpayers will bear a large share of the cost of its restructuring.
High on emergency manager Kevyn Orr's to-do list: slash health care outlays for thousands of early retirees by shifting them to ObamaCare.
Detroit spent $177 million on health benefits for 19,000 retirees last year but figures it can cut that to $28 million-$40 million a year.
Part of the savings would come from paring supplemental coverage for retirees age 65 and older, most of whom already get Medicare.
But the federal government will pick up much of the slack for early retirees through age 64, who will be eligible for subsidized coverage as long as household income is less than 400% of the poverty level.
The news is hardly surprising. While the Motor City is an early mover when it comes to shifting early retirees to ObamaCare, it's not alone and the road for doing so has been well-paved.
Last month, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel — Obama's chief of staff when the law was passed in 2010 — disclosed that the Windy City would shift 30,000 early retirees to ObamaCare. Last year, retiree health care cost the city $109 million, but that's projected to balloon to $500 million within a decade.
Sheboygan County, Wis., also has crunched the numbers and envisions saving $286,000 in the upcoming fiscal year by shifting early retirees to ObamaCare's exchanges starting Jan. 1.
ObamaCare's crafters intended to provide an alternative to employer-provided coverage for retirees, which had long been in decline.
The law set aside $5 billion to offset employer costs from June 2010 until the launch of the subsidized exchanges at the start of 2014. The funds, to reimburse 80% of per-person claims between $15,000 and $90,000, were exhausted by December 2011. New claims were rejected.
About half of the employers who signed up for the program were government entities, including the city of Stockton, which has sought to dump retiree health care in bankruptcy proceedings.
Stockton public employee retirees recently agreed to accept $5.1 million in a lump sum, which is equal to just 2% of their lost health benefits.
The Early Retiree Reinsurance Program was described by the Department of Health and Human Services "as a bridge to the new health insurance Exchanges."
The implication was that employers would cross that bridge by shifting coverage to the federal government come 2014.
While relatively few government entities have declared such an intention, it seems logical to expect many to make that move in the next year or so.
As governments struggle with massive liabilities for pension and health benefits, court rulings have lent support to the contention that pensions are protected under state constitutions. On the other hand, rulings in a number of states have found no such protections for health benefits.
In a recent column, former Comptroller General David Walker wrote that ObamaCare presented "a huge opportunity for states and localities in desperate need of fixing their long-term finances."
He predicted: "The overall tax burden will shift, and in ways that Americans in other more fiscally responsible states may not appreciate."
Walker also warned that the influx of older, high-cost patients into ObamaCare would put upward pressure on premiums and make it less likely younger workers would sign up.
Read More At Investor's Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/061813-660353-detroit-chicago-shift-retiree-costs-to-obamacare.htm
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/06/21/irs-sent-46-million-in-tax-refunds-to-23994-unauthorized-aliens-all-at-the-same-address-in-atlanta/
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/06/21/irs-sent-46-million-in-tax-refunds-to-23994-unauthorized-aliens-all-at-the-same-address-in-atlanta/
Too busy crushing the Tea Party.
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https://mises.org/daily/6460/The-Tollkeepers-on-the-Road-to-Serfdom
The Tollkeepers on the Road to Serfdom
Mises Daily: Friday, June 21, 2013 by D.W. MacKenzie
Elected Federal officials can be voted out of office. But the entrenched army of empowered, unelected Federal bureaucrats remains to wield its power, and the Internal Revenue Service bureaucrats are some of the worst. Six years ago I published an article in The Freeman on the incompatibility of the tax code and liberty, and the threat to liberty continues unabated.
Friedrich Hayek described the process by which bureaucratic empowerment and discretion extirpates personal liberty and democracy as “the road to serfdom.” He warned us all that socialism requires bureaucratization. In the socialist state bureaucrats would become the new aristocracy and its citizens would take on the role of serf. My article argued that similar dangers existed with increasing the powers of the IRS bureaucracy, and that democracy could not be relied upon to hold it in check. Recent abuses validate this fear. Any agency without restraint and accountability is a threat to personal freedom and should be abolished.
I have published critiques of the US government and politicians without IRS reprisal, including some that targeted tax policy and the IRS specifically. The types of concerns I raised regarding IRS authority were spelled out by Hayek in his classic The Road to Serfdom. Scholars from Jeff Sachs to Gordon Tullock have claimed that Hayek’s warnings about abuse in social democracy were overstated. After all, many Western nations have large public budgets and extensive regulations without suffering the dire results that Hayek predicted.
The current IRS scandal has renewed concerns regarding abuse of IRS power. One flagrant example from the last election was the partisan use of the IRS as a political weapon. The IRS has a history of political abuse. Hoover, FDR, JFK, and Richard Nixon all used the IRS against enemies, long before Clinton or Obama. In the wake of recent scandals, some politicians are now investigating the IRS. IRS officials, like Douglas Shulman, Lois Lerner, and Holly Paz, in their appearances before Congress, have exhibited the arrogance of an entitled aristocrat instead of the public servants that they are.
Politicians see the IRS and its tax code as a means of fixing perceived political problems. Republicans want to use tax code to promote family values. Democrats want to use taxes to alleviate poverty and reduce pollution. Yet, regardless of the legislative agenda, it is largely unelected bureaucrats who decide where tax money goes.
Hayek pointed out that neither voters nor Congress can watch or manage modern Federal bureaucracies. Consequently, most bureaucratic actions are unseen. Agencies come under scrutiny only when a non-government entity, or the media finds their actions objectionable enough to sell papers or improve ratings. Last year’s GSA spending scandal took front page headlines away from a different IRS abuse scandal, and before that it was a different agency on the hot seat. The agencies of the Medusa-like Leviathan are too numerous to scrutinize all at once, so it is one agency and one scandal at a time, allowing hundreds of other agencies to function unabated.
The potential for bureaucratic abuse is pervasive. The worst rise to the top of bureaucracies in part because the people who want power most are, as Hayek put it, single-minded idealists. Single-minded idealists are intolerant, by definition, believing that their plans for society are objectively superior to any competing plans. Those who have a comparative advantage at acquiring and wielding power are the most ruthless and insensitive people in society. Obama once said “We're going to punish our enemies and we're going to reward our friends who stand with us.” Some characterize Obama’s remark as “Chicago.” This is not just Chicago politics; all politics works this way because intervention always favors some people over others.
The New Scandal
IRS officials admitted to political bias during the last election. They deliberately delayed hundreds of applications for tax-exempt status, and used inappropriate criteria to select the groups it targeted. The IRS asked inappropriate questions of applicant groups, and targeted Obamas opponents with audits. Romney donor Frank Vandersloot was hit with multiple audits by the IRS (with seven other donors) and also by the Department of Labor, at a cost of $80,000. Katherine Engelbrecht was harassed by the IRS, FBI, BATF, and OSHA.
The Justice Department has moved against the Associated Press and Fox News journalist James Rosen, in particular, over privacy issues. It appears that the EPA has been charging fees according to political bias. Obama most likely did not directly order Lois Lerner or Holly Paz to “punish enemies” in the Tea Party movement, but Tea Party members were singled out. Since Tea Party groups oppose the current Federal tax/spending system, the single-minded idealists at the IRS thought these targeting actions to be justifiable.
The fact that some bureaucrats might now be penalized for their transgressions is good news, but the heart of the problem runs deeper. Hayek pointed out that people complete the path from citizenship to servitude only after a psychological (or sociological) change occurs. Today’s change is from a free people believing in the primacy of individuals to make their own choices to dependence and acceptance of government as the entitled class.
Once people accept bureaucrats as authorities, as persons who should direct the actions of others, and reject dissenting views as illegitimate or illegal, they have taken up the mantle of serf. A recent poll found that 36 percent of self-described liberals thought that the IRS acted appropriately; that it should have singled out Tea Party groups for special investigations and delayed approval of their tax exempt status. In other words, they don’t think that there is a scandal—they believe that the IRS should be used to suppress dissent. Even 26 percent of “Independents” and 15 percent of Republicans found IRS abuses acceptable. One-in-four Americans currently embraces bureaucratic abuse and this is frightening for our future. Passage of The Affordable Care Act and The Dodd-Frank Bill, along with Obama’s reelection, indicate solid voter support for a bureaucratic state.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has declared his intention to prevent IRS abuses from ever happening again, but can he? Conviction of a few IRS or DOJ officials won’t prevent future abuses. Nixon resigned because of abuses that included misuse of IRS power, but the misuse of power didn’t stop. The prospects of reforming the IRS are poor. Fifteen years ago Congress passed The Internal Revenue Service Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998, but here we are again embroiled in yet another wave of IRS scandal.
It is obvious that we cannot rely on political processes to regulate the IRS. Obama’s defenders initially thought that the IRS scandal would increase his approval rating, as it did for Bill Clinton’s, because many Americans sympathized with Clinton during the public inquiries into his misdeeds during the 1990’s. Obama is in a weaker position, but it is still unlikely that the Senate would begin proceedings to remove Obama from office. FDR also misused the IRS, but most Americans see FDR as a great president—despite his corruption and the failures of his policies.
Solutions
As long as unelected, empowered bureaucrats with tenure run the IRS, there is no solution but to abolish it and the Federal Tax Code along with it. Total abolition of the IRS will not happen immediately, but Congress should pass a sunset provision on both the IRS and the Federal Tax Code. Strong feelings of discontent with Obama and the IRS create a temporary opportunity to enact real solutions to recurring IRS abuses. Americans should move against the IRS quickly before these feelings of discontent fade.
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/06/29/hare-brained-usda-reportedly-orders-childrens-magician-to-produce-disaster-plan-for-his-rabbit/
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/06/29/hare-brained-usda-reportedly-orders-childrens-magician-to-produce-disaster-plan-for-his-rabbit/
A spit and a campfire?
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I was thinking in exactly the same way :lol:
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I was thinking in exactly the same way :lol:
Thank god the sequester spared these federal employees. Imagine the chaos without them regulating magicians so closely.
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http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/irs_mistakenly_posted_social_security_J8N94UwwIunpvllubAjoxH?utm_source=SFnewyorkpost&utm_medium=SFnewyorkpost
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http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/irs_mistakenly_posted_social_security_J8N94UwwIunpvllubAjoxH?utm_source=SFnewyorkpost&utm_medium=SFnewyorkpost
Wouldn't happen to be certain people whom the administration dislikes, would it?
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/07/22/former-director-of-doj-group-sent-to-monitor-trayvon-martin-protests-employees-known-to-act-as-advocates-instead-of-mediators/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=story&utm_campaign=Share%20Buttons
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/aug/1/13-wisconsin-officials-raid-animal-shelter-kill-ba/
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http://thehill.com/blogs/regwatch/legislation/315241-house-votes-to-give-congress-power-over-major-regulations
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Sebelius Must Go
The kickoff of Obamacare and rollout of the exchanges since October 1 has been a disaster. It has been a technical disaster, a fiscal disaster, and most importantly, a human disaster. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius should be held responsible.
We now know that the Obama administration’s early characterization of the problems as “glitches” caused by overwhelming demand was disingenuous at best.
The technical failures are extraordinary. Millions of people are supposed to sign up for insurance plans using the exchanges in the next few months, but very few have been able to do it. It appears the system has turned away the vast majority of users. Apparently the flaws are so serious they may not be fixed for “a couple of months,” according to an astonishing New York Times report this weekend.
The Obamacare website, HealthCare.gov, cost taxpayers an estimated $500 million and yet doesn’t work, even after three years of lead time to develop it. For comparison, the Mars Pathfinder (a pretty complex technical undertaking) cost $150 million and was developed in less than three years. It also actually worked.
Details have begun to trickle out about just how poorly the government managed this project. The Times reported:
Deadline after deadline was missed. The biggest contractor, CGI Federal, was awarded its $94 million contract in December 2011. But the government was so slow in issuing specifications that the firm did not start writing software code until this spring, according to people familiar with the process. As late as the last week of September, officials were still changing features of the Web site, HealthCare.gov, and debating whether consumers should be required to register and create password-protected accounts before they could shop for health plans.
Fatefully, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services assumed to itself the responsibility of managing the project, which, the Times continued, “some people intimately involved...seriously doubted that the agency had the in-house capability to handle.”
Much of the complexity was avoidable, but HHS and the White House complicated the challenge for political reasons. In particular, the administration chose to require users to register and enter lots of personal information before showing them the prices of various plans, so that consumers would only see prices after their subsidy was factored in. The administration insisted on the more complex registration system because it was afraid of the sticker shock Americans might feel if they saw the true costs of the policies.
No one, including those Americans who are deeply opposed to Obamacare, should think that the exchange failures are a minor problem. Even the New York Times admitted they “threaten the fiscal health of the insurance initiative,” making the law even more fiscally toxic than it already was. That’s because those Americans who are less likely to have health problems (like young people) need to enroll in the plans to help balance the cost of the more risky, more expensive people who are likely to flood into the system. The technical breakdown poses such a high barrier to entry that the healthy may not bother to enroll and instead simply pay the fine, while those with serious health problems will be willing to spend days trying to sign up, if that’s what it takes. That’s a recipe for financial disaster.
The human disaster is just as significant. Millions of people are being forced to buy health insurance in the next few months--many of them because Obamacare caused their employer to drop their coverage. And yet because the system is failing so badly, these Americans don’t know what coverage they’ll be able to get for themselves and their families, or how much it will cost. When they try to log onto the government website, they’re met with error messages and blank screens--sometimes after hours of frustrating attempts to enroll. This is a horrible position for the administration to put people.
The worst part is that senior officials knew the exchanges weren’t ready to launch but chose to proceed anyway, rather than face the political embarrassment of a delay. Long after they recognized there were major problems with the system, they continued to promise that everything was fine. In June, Secretary Sebelius insisted they were “ready to go on October 1.”
Even after the issues became obvious to the public, Secretary Sebelius remarked glibly that she hoped Americans would “give us the same slack they give Apple,” as though Americans’ health coverage is as trivial a concern as their smartphone software. Later, in a Daily Show interview with Jon Stewart, she claimed she couldn’t say how many Americans had signed up for Obamacare because she didn’t know. The claim is hard to accept, but whether she really didn’t know or she was deliberately deceptive, it doesn’t portend good things for Obamacare.
Senator Pat Roberts has called for Secretary Sebelius to resign, and he’s right. She has presided over one of the largest bureaucratic disasters in recent memory. If she won’t go voluntarily, President Obama should fire her. It’s time for real accountability.
Your Friend,
Newt
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Rationing Bone Marrow
The feds want to control who can donate despite shortages.
Nov. 24, 2013 6:15 p.m. ET
You know an agency has gone off the rails when its rules make the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals look like a beacon of sanity. So it goes at the Department of Health and Human Services, where a proposed rule-making is seeking to override the court's decision to allow bone-marrow donors to be compensated for their donations.
In 1984, Congress passed the National Organ Transplant Act banning the purchase or sale of organs like livers and lungs for transplants. The intention was to prevent the exploitation of poor donors or self-mutilation for profit (think drug addicts). Swept up in the ban was bone marrow, which produces blood cells and is critical to the immune system.
Organs are unique and specialized groups of cells, but bone marrow is a connective tissue that regenerates naturally in a healthy body. In 1984 the typical bone marrow transplant was relatively complicated. Today, you can donate bone marrow through an outpatient procedure called apheresis. A donor receives a series of shots and then is hooked up to a machine that draws blood and collects marrow cells, much like blood donation.
Enlarge Image
Associated Press
The technique is less invasive than egg donation and has none of the risks associated with kidney or liver donation. Unlike blood donors, however, marrow donors cannot be compensated, which has led to shortages for patients with life threatening blood diseases and a waiting list of some 13,900.
In 2009, the Institute for Justice sued on behalf of Maine resident Doreen Flynn, whose three children have a disease called Franconia anemia and will most likely need bone marrow transplants to survive. In 2012's Flynn v. Holder, the Ninth Circuit agreed, noting that new technology and the ease of marrow donation put the ban wholly out of step with the purpose of the organ donation law.
The Justice Department petitioned for rehearing en banc, insisting that marrow transplants should "not be subject to market forces." When the Ninth Circuit declined to rehear the case, the Administration mobilized HHS, which has proposed a rule that would overturn the Ninth Circuit and define marrow extracted from the bloodstream as an organ. The purpose, says the rule, is to "ban the commodification" of bone marrow used in transplants, "encourage altruistic donations, and decrease the likelihood of disease transmission resulting from paid donations."
None of these arguments stands up to scrutiny. If banning donor compensation encouraged altruistic donations, it would already have done so. The ban has been in place for decades and the result is chronic bone-marrow shortages, which have disproportionately affected minorities who have a harder time finding a donor match.
The claim that compensation would increase "disease transmission" is also a straw man. The thousands of people on the waiting list, including many with leukemia and blood cancers or anemia, often need marrow donation to stay alive. Any marginal increase in risk pales next to the certainty of death.
Treating bone marrow as a public resource distributed by the federal government hasn't worked. The Administration's campaign to reimpose the compensation ban and overrule the courts is another example of its penchant for political and bureaucratic control over medical decisions. The rule is open for public comment until December 2, and patients and doctors ought to express their opposition on moral and humanitarian grounds.
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Get used to the words "government" and "rationing" appearing together alot in the next 38 months.
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"Rationing Bone Marrow
The feds want to control who can donate despite shortages."
Get used to the words "government" and "rationing" appearing together alot in the next 38 months.
Government inefficiency is perhaps a redundancy.
I wonder what the price of 8-track tape players would be right now if the government had taken over that industry. All we know for sure is that they would still be state of the art.
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A few weeks after taking office in 2009, Mr. Obama issued a memorandum to government agency heads ordering them to minimize the use of non-competitive contracts, calling them potentially "wasteful, inefficient, subject to misuse."
CBS/Reuters November 25, 2013, 10: 30 AM
Obamacare agency rushed in contractor without bids, documents show
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/obamacare-agency-rushed-in-contractor-without-bids-documents-show/
"representatives of the agency were unavailable to comment on the contract "
Asked about how Novitas was awarded the contract and the work it is doing... a company official told him, "We're not going to be able to get into this right now."
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More from the technocrat elites. So we know that reducing the speed limit would save lives just by lowering the speed limit to a total crawl? So now we make a city of several million slow down even more because statistically we might save some lives. Why not get rid of all the cars? Then the 98 % would be 100%? Why do they decide when where how much? Again the liberals making everyone suffer for some haze stats. No one should ever die (except when they approve - death panels). Every single thing must be studied and data has not become basis of all our laws, how we must live our lives. It will NEVER end. First the world has to give into delayed red lights. Then we have the disability thing that inconveniences 98 % for the few. Now millions must slow down for a relative tiny theoretical gain. No end. There really is no compromise.
****Council Working to Reduce Speed Limit on City Streets
By Jill Colvin 11/26 4:03pm
The New York City Council hopes to pass legislation that would reduce the speed limit on most residential and side streets to 20 miles per hour, Council Speaker Christine Quinn announced today.
“We are actively working on that bill and our goal is to pass it before the end of the year,” Ms. Quinn said during an unrelated press conference this afternoon before the month’s final council meeting. “We’re actively working on it right now.”
The bill, introduced by Councilman David Greenfield, is aimed at reducing serous pedestrian injuries and traffic fatalities. Last year, 148 pedestrians were killed in traffic accidents and crashes.
“We are working to fine-tune this life-saving legislation that will slow down automobiles on narrow residential streets. I am hopeful that we can get consensus on this important legislation, which will literally save lives once it is enacted here in New York City,” he said in response to the speaker’s comments.
But there are complications. The city’s Department of Transportation has argued the proposal would conflict with state law, which only allows limits that low if other traffic-calming devices are used. Last Friday, Councilman Jimmy Vacca, chair of the council’s transportation committee, told WNYC the bill was being “tweaked a little bit” and that members were “aiming for 25 miles per hour on narrow, one-way streets.”
Currently, the speed limit on most city streets is 30 miles per hour, unless otherwise posted. The new regulations would be a boon to advocates–including those who installed their own 20-mile limit signs in Park Slope this week–but have drawn grumbles from some drivers who feel the city’s notoriously gridlocked streets are slow enough.
According to the group Transportation Alternatives, pedestrians have an 80 percent chance of surviving being hit by a car traveling 30 miles per hour and a 98 percent chance of survival if the car is traveling 20 miles per hour.
The measure is just the latest of several recent efforts aimed at making streets safer for pedestrians. Later today, the council is expected to pass another bill, introduced by Councilwoman Debi Rose, aimed at slowing speeds near public and private schools. The rules would require the city to install speed humps near at least 50 schools.
“Speeding is the number one cause of deadly crashes in New York City and we must do everything we can to prevent fatalities,” Mr. Quinn said in a statement touting Mr. Rose’s bill.
A spokeswoman for Mayor Michael Bloomberg did not immediately comment on whether the mayor supports the bill.
Follow Jill Colvin on Twitter or via RSS. jcolvin@observer.com****
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Slowly They Modernize: A Federal Agency That Still Uses Floppy Disks
By JADA F. SMITH
WASHINGTON — The technology troubles that plagued the HealthCare.gov website rollout may not have come as a shock to people who work for certain agencies of the government — especially those who still use floppy disks, the cutting-edge technology of the 1980s. Every day, The Federal Register, the daily journal of the United States government, publishes on its website and in a thick booklet around 100 executive orders, proclamations, proposed rule changes and other government notices that federal agencies are mandated to submit for public inspection.
So far, so good.
It turns out, however, that the Federal Register employees who take in the information for publication from across the government still receive some of it on the 3.5-inch plastic storage squares that have become all but obsolete in the United States.
Now government infrastructure experts are hoping that public embarrassments like the HealthCare.gov debacle will prompt a closer look at the government’s technological prowess, especially if it might mean getting rid of floppy disks.
“You’ve got this antiquated system that still works but is not nearly as efficient as it could be,” said Stan Soloway, chief executive of the Professional Services Council, which represents more than 370 government contractors. “Companies that work with the government, whether longstanding or newcomers, are all hamstrung by the same limitations.”
The use of floppy disks peaked in American homes and offices in the mid-1990s, and modern computers do not even accommodate them anymore. But The Federal Register continues to accept them, in part because legal and security requirements have yet to be updated, but mostly because the wheels of government grind ever slowly.
Davita Vance-Cooks, the head of the Government Printing Office, which oversees The Federal Register, spoke at a congressional hearing on Wednesday about her department’s attempts to make its work remain relevant in a post-print world. Despite creating mobile apps, The Federal Register still requires agencies to submit information on paper, with original signatures, though they can create a digital signature via a secured email system.
Agencies are also permitted to submit the documents on CD-ROMs and floppy disks, but not on flash drives or SD cards. “The Federal Register Act says that an agency has to submit the original and two duplicate originals or two certified copies,” said Amy P. Bunk, The Federal Register’s director of legal affairs and policy. As long as an agency does that through one of the approved methods of transmission, she said, “they’ve met the statutory requirement.”
But the secure email system — which uses software called Public Key Infrastructure technology — is expensive, and some government agencies have not yet upgraded to it. As a result, some agencies still scan documents on to a computer and save them on floppy disks. The disks are then sent by courier to the register.
Ms. Bunk said that although many agencies did use the secure email system, The Federal Register could not require it until Congress made it compulsory by law.
“There are limits as to how far we can make the agencies do everything in lock step,” said Jim Bradley, the assistant public printer for the Government Printing Office. Federal budget cuts, he said, had helped slow down any modernization.
“We’ve got to accommodate the funding and everything else,” Mr. Bradley said. “Some agencies move forward with technology, and that’s great. Other agencies aren’t ready to go this year, maybe not next year.”
A spokesman for The Federal Register would not say which agencies still used floppy disks. But at The Register’s office, a modest space on North Capitol Street in sight of the Capitol dome, couriers were recently seen coming in and out as an employee pulled a floppy disk from one package and at least two CD-ROMs from others.
Meanwhile, experts say that an administration that prided itself on its technological savvy has a long way to go in updating the computer technology of the federal government. HealthCare.gov and the floppy disks of The Federal Register, they say, are but two recent examples of a government years behind the private sector in digital innovation.
Mr. Soloway, of the Professional Services Council, said that the government’s technology was also causing it to fall behind in cooperation with the private sector. “It’s undoubtedly inhibiting the expansion” of what corporations are willing to do with the government, Mr. Soloway said. “And it remains an inhibitor for the next generation of companies.”
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Men With Pelvic Pain Find a Path to Treatment Blocked by a Gynecology Board
Rajah Bose for The New York Times
Dr. Daniel Davidson, an Idaho dentist, has pelvic pain so severe that he cannot sit, and can stand for only limited periods.
By DENISE GRADY
Published: December 10, 2013
NYT
After visiting dozens of doctors and suffering for nearly five years from pelvic pain so severe that he could not work, Daniel Davidson, 57, a dentist in Dalton Gardens, Idaho, finally found a specialist in Phoenix who had an outstanding reputation for treating men like him.
Dr. Davidson, whose pain followed an injury, waited five months for an appointment and even rented an apartment in Phoenix, assuming he would need surgery and time to recover.
Six days before the appointment, it was canceled. The doctor, Michael Hibner, an obstetrician-gynecologist at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center, had learned that members of his specialty were not allowed to treat men and that if he did so, he could lose his board certification — something that doctors need in order to work.
The rule had come from the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology. On Sept. 12, it posted on its website a newly stringent and explicit statement of what its members could and could not do. Except for a few conditions, gynecologists were prohibited from treating men. Pelvic pain was not among the exceptions.
Dr. Davidson went home, close to despair. His condition has left him largely bedridden. The pain makes it unbearable for him to sit, and he can stand for only limited periods before he needs to lie down.
“These characters at the board jerked the rug out from underneath me,” he said.
In an email, Dr. Hibner confirmed that he had stopped treating men, who he said had made up about 10 percent to 15 percent of his practice. He said his staff was trying to find other physicians for about 100 male patients.
Other men are in a similar situation, unsure of where to turn for help. A number of nerve and muscle problems can cause debilitating pelvic pain syndromes in both men and women, but the problems are more common in women, and gynecologists often have the most skill in treating this type of pain, experts in the field say.
The gynecology board differs, saying that many other types of doctors can treat these ailments in men, according to a spokesman, David Margulies, who heads a public relations firm in Dallas. Board members declined to be interviewed.
The same board reversed itself for another group of male patients last month, however, and said gynecologists would be permitted to screen and treat men who are at high risk for anal cancer.
The board has also informed one patient, who appealed to it directly, that he can continue being treated for pelvic pain by Dr. Hibner — the same doctor in Phoenix whom Dr. Davidson had hoped to see. In an email, which the patient shared with The New York Times, a board official said the intent of its policy was “not to have doctors abandon their current patients like you.”
But Mr. Margulies said the permission for that patient’s treatment did not mean that the overall policy had changed. He said, “A one-time exception was made for one individual.”
A specialty group, the International Pelvic Pain Society, wrote to the gynecology board, requesting that gynecologists be permitted to continue treating men for pelvic pain. The board declined.
The pain society has 300 to 400 members; about half are physical therapists, and 40 percent are obstetrician-gynecologists, said Dr. Richard Marvel, a former president and an obstetrician-gynecologist in Annapolis, Md., who has treated men for pelvic pain.
In an email, the pain society said, “Gynecologists with the appropriate skills, experience and knowledge who choose to participate in the care of men with chronic pelvic pain should not be at risk of losing their board certification, solely because they participate in the care of patients who have a real need, suffer tremendously and have limited options for treatment.”
Stephanie Prendergast, president of the pain society and a physical therapist at the Pelvic Health and Rehabilitation Center in San Francisco, said in an email, “I can assure you these gynecologists are better equipped to treat male patients with pelvic pain than most urologists, neurologists, orthopedists, etc.”
Pelvic pain is poorly understood and in men is frequently misdiagnosed as prostate trouble. Major nerves and muscles involved are the same in men and women, so some gynecologists began accepting male patients.
Patients say the pain can be excruciating, and constant.
In an interview, one man, 34, who had pain for years before finding treatment that helped, said, “I never would have been an end-my-life kind of person, but if I got run over by a car I wouldn’t have been that disappointed.”
Treatment may involve physical therapy, daily medication, nerve-block injections, counseling, lifestyle changes and, as a last resort, surgery. It can take months, or longer.
Dr. Marvel said that he had treated 66 men in the last three and half years, and that many had already consulted other doctors. Sometimes the trouble starts with biking; a few patients have been bull riders.
Often he finds that patients have not even been examined properly. Pelvic pain often arises from injured or irritated nerves, and diagnosing it may require sensory testing with pinpricks and cotton swabs in the genital area — a type of exam that many doctors are not comfortable performing, Dr. Marvel said.
Regarding the board’s ruling, he said: “I’m a little stressed out about it. Obviously I don’t want to lose my board certification.” Asked if he would continue treating men, he hesitated, then said: “Well, I mean for now, I plan to still see men if I have men who need the care. But I’m not sure.”
He added: “We don’t really want to fight with the board. But we do want them to see our position, that we’re just trying to help these patients who can’t get help any other way.”
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Imagine the outrage if women weren't being treated for pain...
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Washington's Worst Mistake of 2014?
Veteran regulators warn against making asset managers too big to fail.
Dec. 16, 2013 7:19 p.m. ET
Some consequences of government action remain largely unforeseen until a moment of crisis. That will not be the case if Washington regulators forge ahead on a misguided attempt to treat every large financial firm like a bank.
An experienced and bipartisan group of former regulators is calling it misguided right now. In a nearby letter, former senior officials who oversaw banking, futures and securities markets note the "flawed analysis" and "fundamental misconceptions" contained in a recent report on asset managers by the Treasury Department's Office of Financial Research.
The report, requested by the federal Financial Stability Oversight Council, is widely viewed as a first step toward applying bank regulation to large managers of mutual funds and hedge funds. In today's letter, the veteran regulators explain why restraints that may be appropriate for bankers that play with taxpayer money are antithetical to vibrant capital markets.
For example, a bank examiner should naturally look skeptically at a federally insured institution that is "reaching for yield." But finding a cash-generating asset at a low price is the essence of investing and essential to wealth creation. As the former regulators write, "Investors of all kinds, including asset managers who invest their customers' money, necessarily seek to 'buy low and sell high.' The federal government cannot—and should not—attempt to influence investors' inclinations whether, when and why to buy or sell securities."
The regulators also note that the new federal stability council, which is chaired by the Treasury Secretary and is a creature of Dodd-Frank, suffers from a disturbing lack of transparency and flawed governance. These are problems Congress should address.
But in the meantime the council can best serve the country by resisting the urge to expand the taxpayer safety net. The council's bank regulators have enough to do without trying to remove risk from investing.
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http://thekronies.com
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http://www.policestateusa.com/2014/mark-baker/
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second post
http://tvnz.co.nz/national-news/school-ditches-rules-and-loses-bullies-5807957
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Somewhere we reported here on this case a while back; here is how it developed
http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2014/01/31/gibson-sticks-thumb-in-obama-administrations-eye-with-government-series-guitars
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Medicines Made in India Set Off Safety Worries
By GARDINER HARRISFEB. 14, 2014
NEW DELHI — India, the second-largest exporter of over-the-counter and prescription drugs to the United States, is coming under increased scrutiny by American regulators for safety lapses, falsified drug test results and selling fake medicines.
Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg, the commissioner of the United States Food and Drug Administration, arrived in India this week to express her growing unease with the safety of Indian medicines because of “recent lapses in quality at a handful of pharmaceutical firms.”
India’s pharmaceutical industry supplies 40 percent of over-the-counter and generic prescription drugs consumed in the United States, so the increased scrutiny could have profound implications for American consumers.
F.D.A. investigators are blitzing Indian drug plants, financing the inspections with some of the roughly $300 million in annual fees from generic drug makers collected as part of a 2012 law requiring increased scrutiny of overseas plants. The agency inspected 160 Indian drug plants last year, three times as many as in 2009. The increased scrutiny has led to a flood of new penalties, including half of the warning letters the agency issued last year to drug makers.
Launch media viewer
Ranbaxy, one of India’s biggest drug manufacturers, pleaded guilty to felony charges and paid a $500 million fine last year. Adnan Abidi/Reuters
Dr. Hamburg was met by Indian officials and executives who, shocked by recent F.D.A. export bans of generic versions of popular medicines — like the acne drug Accutane, the pain drug Neurontin and the antibiotic Cipro — that the F.D.A. determined were adulterated, suspect that she is just protecting a domestic industry from cheaper imports.
“There are some people who take a very sinister view of the F.D.A. inspections,” Keshav Desiraju, India’s health secretary until this week, said in a recent interview.
The F.D.A.'s increased enforcement has already cost Indian companies dearly — Ranbaxy, one of India’s biggest drug manufacturers, pleaded guilty to felony charges and paid a $500 million fine last year, the largest ever levied against a generic company. And many worry that worse is in store.
“If I have to follow U.S. standards in inspecting facilities supplying to the Indian market,” G. N. Singh, India’s top drug regulator, said in a recent interview with an Indian newspaper, “we will have to shut almost all of those.”
The unease culminated Tuesday when a top executive at Ranbaxy — which has repeatedly been caught lying to the F.D.A. and found to have conditions such as flies “too numerous to count” in critical plant areas — pleaded with Dr. Hamburg at a private meeting with other drug executives to allow his products into the United States so that the company could more easily pay for fixes. She politely declined.
India’s drug industry is one of the country’s most important economic engines, exporting $15 billion in products annually, and some of its factories are world-class, virtually undistinguishable from their counterparts in the West. But others suffer from serious quality control problems. The World Health Organization estimated that one in five drugs made in India are fakes. A 2010 survey of New Delhi pharmacies found that 12 percent of sampled drugs were spurious.
In one recent example, counterfeit medicines at a pediatric hospital in Kashmir are now suspected of playing a role in hundreds of infant deaths there in recent years.
One widely used antibiotic was found to contain no active ingredient after being randomly tested in a government lab. The test was kept secret for nearly a year while 100,000 useless pills continued to be dispensed.
More tests of hospital medicines found dozens more that were substandard, including a crucial intravenous antibiotic used in sick infants.
“Some of the fake tablets were used by pregnant women in the post-surgical prevention of infections,” said Dr. M. Ishaq Geer, senior assistant professor of pharmacology at the University of Kashmir. “That’s very serious.”
Investigations of the deaths are continuing, but convictions of drug counterfeiters in India are extremely rare.
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Satish Reddy, president of the Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance, said Indian drug manufacturers were better than the F.D.A. now contends. “More rigorous enforcement is needed, for sure, but this impression that India is overrun with counterfeits is unjustified,” Mr. Reddy said.
But Heather Bresch, chief executive of Mylan, which has plants in the United States and India, said regulatory scrutiny outside the United States was long overdue. “If there were no cops around, would everyone drive the speed limit?” Ms. Bresch asked. “You get careless, start taking risks. Our government has enabled this.”
Launch media viewer
Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg, the head of the Food and Drug Administration, is in India this week to express her concerns. Associated Press
For Dr. Hamburg, the trip is part of a long-running effort to create a global network of drug and food regulators to help scrutinize the growing flood of products coming into the United States, including 80 percent of the seafood consumed in the United States, 50 percent of the fresh fruit, 20 percent of the vegetables and the vast majority of drugs.
She has gone to conclaves of regulators from Europe and elsewhere to coordinate policing, but Indian officials have so far not attended such meetings.
Many of India’s drug manufacturing facilities are of top quality. Cipla, one of the industry’s giants, has 40 plants across the country that together can produce more than 21 billion tablets and capsules annually, and one of its plants in Goa appeared just as sterile, automated and high tech on a recent tour as those in the United States.
Cipla follows F.D.A. guidelines at every plant and on every manufacturing line, and the company exports more than 55 percent of its production, said Yusuf Hamied, the company chairman.
But Benjamin Mwesige, a pharmacist at the Uganda Cancer Institute in Kampala, said in an interview in July that the institute had stopped buying cancer drugs from India in 2011 because it had received shipments of drugs that turned out to be counterfeit and inactive, with Cipla labels that Mr. Mwesige believed were forged.
He became suspicious when doctors began seeing chemotherapy patients whose cancer showed none of the expected responses to the drugs — and who also had none of the usual side effects. The drugs that had been prescribed were among the mainstays of cancer treatment — methotrexate, docetaxel and vincristine. Laboratory tests confirmed that the drugs were bogus, and Mr. Mwesige estimated that in 2011 20 percent of the drugs that the institute bought were counterfeit.
Enforcement of regulations over all is very weak, analysts say, and India’s government does a poor job policing many of its industries. Last month, the United States Federal Aviation Administration downgraded India’s aviation safety ranking because the country’s air safety regulator was understaffed, and a global safety group found that many of India’s best-selling small cars were unsafe.
India’s Central Drugs Standard Control Organization, the country’s drug regulator, has a staff of 323, about 2 percent the size of the F.D.A.'s, and its authority is limited to new drugs. The making of medicines that have been on the market at least four years is overseen by state health departments, many of which are corrupt or lack the expertise to oversee a sophisticated industry. Despite the flood of counterfeit drugs, Mr. Singh, India’s top drug regulator, warned in meetings with the F.D.A. of the risk of overregulation.
This absence of oversight, however, is a central reason India’s pharmaceutical industry has been so profitable. Drug manufacturers estimate that routine F.D.A. inspections add 25 percent to overall costs. In the wake of the 2012 law that requires the F.D.A. for the first time to equalize oversight of domestic and foreign plants, India’s cost advantage could shrink significantly.
Some top manufacturers are already warning that they may leave, tough medicine for an already slowing economy.
“I’m a great nationalist, an Indian first and last,” Dr. Hamied said. “But companies like Cipla are looking to expand their businesses abroad and not in India.”
American businesses and F.D.A. officials are just as concerned about the quality of drugs coming out of China, but the F.D.A.'s efforts to increase inspections there have so far been frustrated by the Chinese government.
“China is the source of some of the largest counterfeit manufacturing operations that we find globally,” said John P. Clark, Pfizer’s chief security officer, who added that Chinese authorities were cooperative.
Using its new revenues, the F.D.A. tried to bolster its staff in China in February 2012. But the Chinese government has so far failed to provide the necessary visas despite an announced agreement in December 2013 during a visit by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., said Erica Jefferson, an F.D.A. spokeswoman.
The United States has become so dependent on Chinese imports, however, that the F.D.A. may not be able to do much about the Chinese refusal. The crucial ingredients for nearly all antibiotics, steroids and many other lifesaving drugs are now made exclusively in China.
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http://www.examiner.com/article/south-carolina-policy-requiring-a-fee-and-permit-to-feed-homeless-begins?cid=sm-facebook-021714-9.00am-permittofeedhomeless
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/03/04/the-romeikes-can-stay-shocking-180-in-the-case-of-german-home-schooling-family/
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Resident Fighting EPA's Wrath
A Wyoming resident is feeling the wrath of Barack Obama's EPA for inadvertently defying the agency's strict approval methods. His horrendous act? Building a stock pond back in 2012 ... on his own property. Andy Johnson and his wife constructed the pond with the state's authorization; however, the EPA says that the Johnsons violated federal law for failing to obtain approval from the Army Corps of Engineers. As a result, the EPA is threatening to fine Mr. Johnson $75,000 a day unless he complies with their order of rectifying the situation -- a fine Johnson vows not to pay. "I have not paid them a dime nor will I," he says. "I will go bankrupt if I have to fighting it. ... This goes a lot further than a pond. It's about a person's rights." Indeed it is. The EPA's power grab is blatantly unconstitutional, though such unlawful behavior is to be expected from an administration that has no regard for the Rule of Law.
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Fcuking outrageous.
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http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304418404579466930939764344?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADSecond&mg=reno64-wsj
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These are all Compliance Regulations that lenders must comply with. No wonder everyone is hiring compliance officers and also that loan origination costs are going up.
Dodd Frank
HUD's Reg. X (RESPA)
Reg. Z (Truth in Lending)
Fair Lending Reg. B (ECOA)
Reg AA (Unfair, Deceptive, and Abusive Acts & Practices – UDAAP)
Reg. N (Mortgage Acts and Practices - Advertising)
Home Owners Protection Act (HOPA),
Reg. C (Home Mortgage Disclosure Act - HMDA)
Fair Credit Reporting (FCRA)
Fair & Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACTA)
Reg CC (Expedited Funds Availability)
Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA)
Flood Disaster Protection Act
CAN-SPAM Act, Reg. P (Privacy of Consumer Financial Information - Right to Privacy, Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act)
Reg. BB (Community Reinvestment Act (CRA)
Secure and Fair Mortgage Enforcement (SAFE Act - CFPB Reg. G)
Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce (E-SIGN Act)
Reg. E (Electronic Funds Transfer)
Reg. O (Credit to Insiders)
Reg. D (Reserve Requirements)
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http://reason.com/blog/2014/04/28/doj-operation-chokepoint-and-porn-stars
Seemingly not concrete yet, but the hypothetical link is interesting. From the article:
"The very premise is clearly chilling—the DOJ is coercing private businesses in an attempt to centrally engineer the American marketplace based on it's own politically biased moral judgements. Targeted business categories so far have included payday lenders, ammunition sales, dating services, purveyors of drug paraphernalia, and online gambling sites."
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BD-- great to have you with us again!
May I ask you to post this in the Fascism thread as well please?
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http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304178104579533693554509288?mod=Opinion_newsreel_1
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Exposing the EPA
Documents reveal a lawless attempt to block an Alaska mine project.
May 12, 2014 6:57 p.m. ET
A basic precept of American democracy is that petitioners before their government receive a full and fair hearing. The Obama Environmental Protection Agency is in urgent need of that remedial civics lesson.
The EPA inspector general's office last week announced it will investigate the agency's February decision to commence a pre-emptive veto of the Pebble Mine project, a jobs-rich proposal to develop America's largest U.S. copper and gold mine in southwest Alaska. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy says her decision to strike down Pebble before it received a hearing shouldn't worry other developers because Pebble is a "unique" threat. She needs to say this because the truth might chill billions of dollars in investment in the U.S.
The IG is looking into internal EPA documents that we've also obtained that show agency officials were maneuvering to kill Pebble more than five years ago, and that EPA's main concern was building a façade of science and procedure to justify it.
This story goes back to the debate over the 1972 Clean Water Act, which gave the Army Corps of Engineers the power to evaluate projects and issue permits. Congress gave EPA only a secondary role of reviewing and potentially vetoing projects (with cause) under Section 404c. EPA has long chafed at this secondary role, which has made it harder to nix projects approved by the Corps.
Enlarge Image
A worker with the Pebble Mine project test drills in the Bristol Bay region of Alaska in 2007. Associated Press
EPA's decision to initiate a veto process before Pebble had even received an Army Corps review is a disturbing first—and a flouting of the law. The internal documents refute EPA's repeated claims that it began this process only in "response to petitions" from local Native American tribes in May 2010, and that peer-reviewed science drove its veto.
Emails show that EPA biologist Phillip North, based in Alaska and working on Pebble, was in 2008 advocating that his agency bring down the 404c hammer. "The 404 program has a major role" with Pebble, wrote Mr. North to Patricia McGrath, EPA's regional mining coordinator for Alaska, in August 2008. By August 2009, Mr. North was pushing for EPA's annual mining retreat to include a discussion about vetoing the project: "As you know, I feel that [Pebble] merit consideration of a 404C veto." The retreat included that discussion, though Pebble's developer hadn't yet applied for a permit.
By early 2010 EPA staff made a Power Point presentation for former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson about Pebble that lists a "pre-emptive" veto under "future options." Emails also show that Mr. North was actively engaging outside critics of Pebble. When the Bristol Bay Native Corp. filed a veto request in August 2010, Mr. North responded in an email to the group's lawyer: "Hi Peter, We have been discussing 404c quite a bit internally at all levels of EPA. The letter will certainly stoke the fire."
The EPA veto decision looks to have been made by mid-2010. A Fish and Wildlife briefing paper dated that summer reads: "The [EPA] is seeking [Fish and Wildlife] support as they initiate a formal process to issue a determination that [the wetlands] within the potential pebble Mine action are unsuitable for the placement of fill material. This action would be conducted under the authority of Section 404(C) of the Clean Water Act."
A September 2010 email from U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist Phil Brna to colleagues—under the subject heading "Pebble and 404c"—reads: "I spoke with Phil North. . . . He believes EPA leaders have decided to proceed and they are just deciding when." All this happened before the EPA had done any scientific review.
There's also an internal EPA document from September 2010 laying out the "pros" and "cons" of the EPA vetoing in the "traditional" fashion, rather than pre-emptively. Listed under the many "pros" of ignoring the law is that a pre-emptive Pebble veto can serve as a "model of proactive watershed planning." So much for Ms. McCarthy's claim that this veto is a one-timer.
Only after all of this did EPA concoct its sham watershed study that provided the scientific cover for its veto. That study invented a hypothetical Pebble mine, then assumed outdated mining practices to predict environmental harm. The study included contributions from obvious opponents of the mine, including Mr. North. The EPA's own peer-review experts ridiculed the study; one pronounced its key sections "pure hogwash."
These documents depict an agency willing to do anything necessary to gut the permitting process that the Clean Water Act guaranteed for developers. The Pebble veto model sets up EPA as the sole regulator of watersheds across the country, trumping the authority of the Army Corps and state regulators. The EPA's actions on Pebble make clear why Congress was right not to trust it with the power it has now seized.
EPA has been trying to keep this record hidden. Pebble Partnership received some of these documents through a freedom of information request, but CEO Tom Collier confirms to us that the EPA didn't turn over others that we are reporting here. EPA Inspector General Arthur Elkins has clearly decided that there is enough to warrant an investigation, and that's a start. This is merely the latest in the EPA's growing record of dishonesty aimed at denying U.S. companies their rights under the law.
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Free speech? Not if you're a critic of Obama's government.
http://washingtonexaminer.com/article/2548163 (http://washingtonexaminer.com/article/2548163)
P.C.
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Great to have you with us again Prentice!
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLKi0EWpjFI&feature=youtu.be
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http://hotair.com/archives/2014/05/14/npr-explains-all-taxes-and-mandate-costs-in-obamacare-story/
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http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/14/opinion/gingrich-va-problem-system-not-secretary?utm_source=Gingrich+Productions+List&utm_campaign=d66a66df96-va051414&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bd29bdc370-d66a66df96-46602837
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Free market principles call for the facts to be known. This is a regulation I support:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/22/business/us-seeks-disclosure-of-all-fees-fliers-face.html?emc=edit_th_20140522&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193
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Free market principles call for the facts to be known. This is a regulation I support:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/22/business/us-seeks-disclosure-of-all-fees-fliers-face.html?emc=edit_th_20140522&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193
Agree. Maybe we could remove 10 bad regulations for every good one that we add. Instead the answer is to just keep adding more laws.
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Let's Get 'Metaphysical'
A federal court slaps down an Obama regulator's legal abuse.
May 23, 2014 6:44 p.m. ET
President Obama's energy regulators have pushed the law to the hilt and beyond in their campaign against carbon, but maybe the courts are starting to get queasy. The latest is the D.C. Court of Appeals, which on Friday cashiered a rule meant to harm traditional power plants.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) used to be the rare government outfit that preferred to stay out of the news, but under Chairman Jon Wellinghoff the legal and economic offenses in favor of noncarbon power sources piled up. The Senate is now weighing Mr. Wellinghoff's replacement, Norman Bay, and one question is whether he'll continue the regulatory method that produced the rule the D.C. Circuit has now tossed as an abuse of power.
FERC governs the electricity grid, and in 2011 Mr. Wellinghoff ordered transmission operators to pay retail energy users to reduce their power consumption at peak periods. This smart-grid program is known as "demand response" and can help run the system more efficiently and reliably. But FERC rigged this well-meaning incentive to harm traditional baseload power, especially coal but also natural gas and nuclear.
The problem is that Congress limited FERC's mandate to the wholesale interstate power markets—that is, power supply. Authority over retail power demand is reserved to the "exclusive jurisdiction" of the states.
FERC regulated anyway, claiming that the demand-response program would "directly affect" the regional level and therefore the two distinct state and interstate spheres were essentially the same. Judge Janice Rogers Brown shreds that logic as a "metaphysical distinction." She goes on to note that FERC's rationale "has no limiting principle" because changes in one market inevitably beget changes in another. FERC could use the same rationale to claim jurisdiction over "any number of areas, including the steel, fuel and labor markets."
The D.C. Circuit ruled FERC lacked statutory authority but then took a further step and declared the demand-response rule "arbitrary and capricious" on the merits, which is unusual. The courts generally defer to the judgment of regulators, and the Administrative Procedures Act blesses all but the most egregious overreach.
Especially abusive was FERC's discriminatory compensation scheme. FERC reasoned that not consuming power was identical to adding power to the grid and therefore service providers that took advantage of demand response deserved to be paid the same full market rate as power generators. But so-called "negawatts" are different from real megawatts, not least because power producers incur the costs of actually producing electricity and sending that power to consumers.
In practice, demand response paid out twice to the service providers, once from the FERC rebate plus the savings of not buying electricity. Overpaying for not doing something and underpaying for real economic benefits distorts price signals and leads to a misallocation of resources from electricity investment.
For this reason FERC Commissioner Phil Moeller dissented at the time, and economists and industry objected. Mr. Wellinghoff overruled, and FERC held that "the Commission is not limited to textbook economic analysis." The D.C. Circuit has replied that in fact it is and that the commission was harming the reliability of power markets it is supposed to protect.
On that note, Mr. Bay, the nominee for FERC Chairman, did little to distance himself from the Wellinghoff legacy when he testified on Tuesday, nor did he explain his own history of prosecutorial abuse at the commission. His answer to every question was that he didn't know, he wasn't sure, or he couldn't say.
But if Mr. Bay is confirmed, his job becomes even more important after the D.C. Circuit opinion. Over the last two years demand-response programs have suffused the grid and barring a successful appeal, which is unlikely given the sweep of the ruling, the feds will now be banned from regulating electricity demand.
Yet the forthcoming Environmental Protection Agency regulations on power plant carbon emissions—due in two weeks—will probably depend on FERC's demand-response distortion. Ending the conservation subsidies while simultaneously imposing rules that will force the retirement of existing coal power could do even more to endanger the grid and lead to rolling blackouts. West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin asked Mr. Bay about grid reliability but he only responded that "I have not been following the decisional process at EPA closely enough to know."
The D.C. Circuit thunderclap could help restore the old nonpolitical FERC, but so would a Chairman with more fidelity to the law than Mr. Bay
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/29/opinion/why-license-a-florist.html?emc=edit_th_20140529&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193
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Columnist Mona Charen: "After the press loses interest in the Veterans Affairs scandal, after the investigations have been completed and one or two officials have resigned, nothing will change. Is this cynicism? Not really. It comes down to one's view of how much government can achieve by bureaucratic, top-down management. ... Even if Obama were the best manager in the world, the problems with efficient service delivery by government would continue -- because the government is too large, too unwieldy and too lacking in incentives for efficiency to yield much, if at all, to management. A business that fails to deliver services will be crushed by its competitors. Government can never go out of business. ... No central authority can make a system like the VA or the IHS or Britain's National Health Service run efficiently. Competition is the only system that gives the power to consumers to reward good service and punish bad. But progressives cannot shed their faith that more government is the answer to bad government, so this story is sure to be repeated."
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Columnist Mona Charen: "After the press loses interest in the Veterans Affairs scandal, after the investigations have been completed and one or two officials have resigned, nothing will change. Is this cynicism? Not really. It comes down to one's view of how much government can achieve by bureaucratic, top-down management. ... Even if Obama were the best manager in the world, the problems with efficient service delivery by government would continue -- because the government is too large, too unwieldy and too lacking in incentives for efficiency to yield much, if at all, to management. A business that fails to deliver services will be crushed by its competitors. Government can never go out of business. ... No central authority can make a system like the VA or the IHS or Britain's National Health Service run efficiently. Competition is the only system that gives the power to consumers to reward good service and punish bad. But progressives cannot shed their faith that more government is the answer to bad government, so this story is sure to be repeated."
It boggles the mind that any honest liberal who would not trust a small number of corporations to control any industry because they would only be in it for themselves would instead trust one bloated, top-down, power hungry bureaucracy with that same responsibility - even after they are proven to be a corrupt, self-interested and miserable failure.
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Leftists never let reality intrude on their feelings.
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http://online.wsj.com/articles/gordon-crovitz-uber-shocks-the-regulators-1402869510
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/19/us/maine-court-fight-pits-farmers-against-state-and-one-another.html?emc=edit_th_20140619&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=49641193
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Crafty from race, origin, discrimination thread: "I just went to washingtonredskins.com and bought two t-shirts"
And ccp mentioned Cracker Barrel.
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From Daily Caller:
12 Trademarks Declared Less Offensive Than Redskins
http://dailycaller.com/2014/06/18/12-trademarks-declared-less-offensive-than-redskins/
(I am very tempted to not post the details, but here goes...)
In a ruling Wednesday morning, the United States Patent and Trademark Office cancelled six federal trademarks for the name of the Washington Redskins. (RELATED: US Patent Office Cancels ‘Redskins’ Trademark)
Currently, federal trademark law does not allow the registration of any names that bring individuals or groups into contempt or disrepute. The PTO cited this rule in their decision regarding the Redskins’ name.
Here are twelve other trademarked names that apparently didn’t come up on anyone’s offense radar.
Figgas over Niggas: This pending trademark seeks to cover a line of “Apparel for dancers, namely, tee shirts, sweatshirts, pants, leggings, shorts and jackets.” “Niggas,” of course, is a slang version of the word “nigger,” a term considered highly offensive towards black Americans.
Kraut Kap: Another recently-filed trademark, this one for a line of plastic lids. “Kraut” was made famous in World War II as a derogatory term for opposing German soldiers, as well as Germans in general.
Dago Swagg: A label created for a line of clothing. ”Dago” is a corruption of the common name Diego, and is used in English-speaking countries as an offensive term for those of Italian descent, and occasionally people from other Mediterranean countries as well.
Cracka Azz Skateboards: Unsurprisingly, this trademark was taken out for a line of skateboards and longboards, as well as associated clothing such as bandannas. While the USPTO helpfully notes that “The wording ‘cracka azz’ has no meaning in a foreign language,” “cracka” is a slang version of “cracker,” which in this context is a term of derision for whites, used primarily within the black community.
You Can’t Make A Housewife Out Of A Whore: This trademark for T-shirts and hats appears to imply that women involved in prostitution can never transition into the domestic role of a housewife. Such an accusation would certainly “bring them into contempt or disrepute,” the stated reasoning for eliminating the Redskins trademark.
Blanco Basura: A seemingly innocuous phrase, Blanco Basura, rendered into English, is actually the highly offensive slur “white trash.” White trash is a derogatory insult that typically refers to poor, white Americans, who have a penchant for crime and a patent disrespect for authority. Apparently, they thought they could go unnoticed designing a hateful beer.
Home Cookin Biscuit Head: Intentionality, as we well know, is not required in order for something to be highly, highly offensive. They should’ve done their due diligence before designing this logo for the restaurant industry. The term “biscuit head” has its origins in the Korean War, when American GIs picked this unseemly term to describe the shape of Koreans’ heads.
by TaboolaSponsored Content
‘teensdoporn.com’: This is a classic example (Safe For Work) of a harmful stereotype used to justify condescension toward teens in the form of countless hours of sex-ed in high school. It wrongfully supposes that all teens are sex-crazed maniacs, who given the chance, will opt for trading their sexuality on a website for fame and fortune.
Gypsy Soule Women Who Live By Their Own Rules: This line of makeup containers and tote bags is a double whammy. “Gypsy” is a term for the itinerant Romani people that derives from the erroneous belief they originated from Egypt, rather than India. In addition, the “Live by their own rules” component hearkens to the common stereotype that Romani routinely ignore the law and engage in criminality.
Mammy Jamia’s: A company going by the name of A & S Cairns Limited has decided to attach its good name to an antebellum slur used to refer to an enslaved black woman who was in charge of household affairs, particularly caring for white children. The product? Frozen fruits and vegetables. Was it really worth it, A &S?
Uppity Negro: Intended to be imprinted on mugs and apparel, this trademark references the frequently used adjective “uppity” to describe blacks who agitated for greater respect and civil rights in the Jim Crow-era South.
All Natural My Dadz Nutz Carmelized Jumbo Redskins: Available at MyDadzNutz.com, this line of savory peanuts is unlikely to run into trouble for applying “redskin” to a line of peanuts. One might argue the two terms describe different things, and so the overlap does not matter, but that hasn’t stopped the old name for Brazil nuts from fading away. Kaffir limes, meanwhile, are a discouraged name in the Oxford Companion to Food, as “kaffir” is a highly offensive term for blacks in South Africa.
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WSJ
What Is the EPA Hiding From the Public?
The agency shouldn't get to decide who sees the science behind its rules. Open the research to outside analysis.
By Lamar Smith
June 23, 2014 6:45 p.m. ET
The climate is changing and, yes, humans play a role. But that does not mean, as Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy would have us believe, that the debate—over how much the climate is changing, how big a role humans play, and what can reasonably done about it—is over. Still less does it mean that anyone who questions her agency's actions, particularly the confidential research it uses to justify multimillion and billion-dollar air rules, is a denier at war with science.
The EPA's regulatory process today is a closed loop. The agency funds the scientific research it uses to support its regulations, and it picks the supposedly independent (but usually agency-funded) scientists to review it. When the regulations are challenged, the courts defer to the agency on scientific issues. But the agency refuses to make public the scientific research it uses.
Enlarge Image
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy Getty Images
The House Science Committee will vote Tuesday on legislation to open up this closed loop. The Secret Science Reform Act, which I co-sponsored, has a simple goal: EPA regulations should be based on legitimate science and data that are open to the public.
Scientific journals in a variety of disciplines have moved toward data transparency. Ms. McCarthy sees this effort as a threat. Speaking before the National Academy of Sciences in late April, she defended her agency's need to protect data "from those who are not qualified to analyze it."
The EPA essentially decides who is or is not allowed access to the scientific research they use—research that is paid for with public funds, appropriated by Congress, on behalf of American taxpayers. This is wholly improper.
I recently received a letter of support for the Secret Science Reform Act that was signed by more than 80 scientists, including physicians, and professors of environmental science, physics, statistics, economics and engineering. The signatories included George Wolff, former chair of the EPA's Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee in the Clinton administration and Forrest J. Remick, former commissioner of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the George H.W. Bush administration. They wrote that the bill would "make the agency's regulations more accountable, credible, and enforceable" and that its transparency requirements "can be accomplished without imposing unnecessary burdens, discouraging research, or raising confidentiality concerns."
Costly environmental regulations must be based on publicly available data that independent scientists can verify. For example, take the administration's recently proposed plan to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants—regulations that could cost hundreds of thousands of jobs and spike electricity rates.
In the announcement of her agency's 645-page Clean Power Plan, Ms. McCarthy claimed "The science is clear. The risks are clear. And the high costs of climate inaction keep piling up." Yet any reporter willing to read beyond the EPA press release would find that the reality doesn't match the rhetoric.
Monday's Supreme Court decision (Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA) underscores the need for scrutiny of agency claims. The court called EPA's rewriting of the Clean Air Act "outrageous," and said that "When an agency claims to discover in a long-extant statute an unheralded power to regulate 'a significant portion of the American economy,' we typically greet its announcement with a measure of skepticism." Such skepticism is well deserved.
Virtually all of the EPA's health claims for its latest power-plant rules, including that they would save thousands of lives a year, are based on data that haven't been made public. In any event, for most of the EPA's 2030 projections, a majority of the health benefits claimed have nothing to do with carbon dioxide. They come from reductions in air pollutants already regulated by the EPA such as particulate matter and ozone.
The EPA also claims that its Clean Power Plan will yield climate benefits, such as lower sea levels, which the agency calculates using its "social cost of carbon." But a recent analysis by Ted Gayer, vice president and director of economic studies at the Brookings Institution, found that most of these alleged benefits take place outside the U.S. Even using the EPA's own numbers, the costs of this regulation may exceed the direct, domestic benefits.
The EPA, like every other government institution, should be accountable to the American people. We need to protect our environment, but this should be done on the basis of open and honest information. That is the goal of the Secret Science Reform Act.
Mr. Smith, a Republican from Texas, is chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.
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Study Finds Elementary Students Like New Healthier Lunches
Students Complained When Regulations Implemented, But Ultimately Found Them Agreeable
by Caroline Porter and Stephanie Armour
WSJ
Updated July 21, 2014 7:39 p.m. ET
A new study reveals that the healthier school lunches despised in 2012 are now found to be agreeable among students and staffers. Caroline Porter joins the News Hub with Sara Murray. Photo: Getty Images.
When the federal government implemented new school-meal regulations in 2012, a majority of elementary-school students complained about the healthier lunches, but by the end of the school year most found the food agreeable, according to survey results released Monday.
The peer-reviewed study comes amid concerns that the regulations led schools to throw away more uneaten food and prompted some students to drop out of meal programs.
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago surveyed administrators at more than 500 primary schools about student reaction to the new meals in the 2012-2013 school year. They found that 70% agreed or strongly agreed that students, by the end of the school year, generally liked the new lunches, which feature more whole grains, vegetables and fruits, and lower fat levels.
"We feel like these data support the new meals and show that although change can be slow, there have not been as many student complaints as thought to be," said Lindsey Turner, the lead author of the study, which will be published in the journal Childhood Obesity. The research was supported by a national group called Bridging the Gap that studies polices that improve health and was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which backs public-health initiatives.
In another study, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine this past spring, researchers found that students were eating more fruits and vegetables under the new guidelines.
The school-meal standards have been contentious. Some Republicans criticized their calorie limits—the first time the government had imposed such a mandate on school meals—and in 2012 introduced legislation in the House to repeal the requirements. The standards also spurred student-led lunch boycotts in some districts.
Participation in the school-meal program has declined in recent years, fueling questions about the regulations' impact.
"Our big concern is that participation continues to slide," said Diane Pratt-Heavner, spokeswoman for the School Nutrition Association, which represents 55,000 school-nutritional professionals. The group seeks a relaxation of the rules, and says it believes they play a role in the decline in students participating.
Nationwide, participation in the school-lunch program fell by 1.2 million students, or 3.7%, from the 2010-2011 school year through the 2012-2013 year after having steadily increased for many years, according to a Feb. 27 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. State and local officials reported the drop was due in part to the new standards.
The study released Monday shows that schools in which two-thirds or more of students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch had higher participation and left less food on their plates than schools with fewer students qualified for the meals. In addition, administrators at rural schools reported more student complaints and wasted food, as well as participation drops, as compared with urban or suburban schools, according to the report.
The rules cover the roughly 32 million children who eat school breakfasts, lunches and snacks, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which says the program cost $15.2 billion in the 2013-2014 school year.
The requirement for healthier school food was a signature push of first lady Michelle Obama. The standards are aimed at reducing childhood obesity and were released in January 2012. Ms. Obama earlier this month vowed to fight GOP efforts to weaken the rules. House Republicans and the School Nutrition Association are seeking to relax some of the requirements in the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010.
House Republicans are calling for some schools facing financial challenges to get a temporary waiver from the rules. They say the standards have been money losers for some districts. Democrats say the schools simply need more time and that many have made a successful transition.
"It takes students a little bit to adjust," said Jessica Donze Black, a child nutrition expert for the Pew Charitable Trusts, a nonprofit that promotes healthy school meals. "A majority of schools are doing well, and we should be able to learn from those schools and move forward with the schools that are still struggling."
A hearing on school nutrition by the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry is set for Wednesday.
Write to Caroline Porter at caroline.porter@wsj.com and Stephanie Armour at stephanie.armour@wsj.com
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Cities who take HUD funding--- basically all of them-- could fall under federal jurisdiction for neighborhood planning quotas.
http://mobile.wnd.com/2014/07/new-obama-rule-could-force-cities-to-house-illegals/
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This was published in the Canada Free Press and some blogs. [And not in the US press? Surprise surprise. ]
Green Energy for Dead Vets
Daniel Greenfield
Three years before Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki would be forced out of his job because of the veterans who had died under him, he visited the Massachusetts National Cemetery . He wasn't there to see the men and women who had died because of him.
While vets were dying, Obama and Shinseki had turned their attention to something truly important; seeing to it that all the cemeteries where they were being buried had wind or solar power.
The Massachusetts National Cemetery was getting a wind turbine so that the dead veterans would have all the sustainable energy they needed.
A VA press release about the cemetery turbine boasted that "under the leadership of Secretary Eric K. Shinseki... VA is transitioning into a 21st century organization that better serves America ’s Veterans."
Shinseki arrived in person at the dedication ceremony to flip the switch on the cemetery wind turbine.
“Nationally, VA continues to expand its investment in renewable sources of energy to promote our Nation’s energy independence, save taxpayer dollars, and improve care for our Veterans and their families,” he said.
The cemetery turbine had cost $533,000. Veterans were dying to save the VA a few hundred dollars. Shinseki had made his order of priorities clear. Green energy boondoggles came first. Improving veteran care came last.
Acting Under Secretary for Memorial Affairs Steve Muro told the crowd, "With one of VA’s first wind turbine projects, the Massachusetts National Cemetery is leading the way in the use of renewable energy while providing the burial benefits that New England Veterans and their families have earned."
Muro had made the entire macabre spectacle worthy of a Joseph Heller novel. Obama's people had not only killed veterans, they had killed satire.
When the VA wasn't installing a wind turbine at a cemetery, it was installing solar panels at cemeteries to better serve the dead veterans that it was killing.
The Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery’s solar panels cost $787,308. According to the press release, the solar panels in the cemetery would "reduce greenhouse gas emissions".
$742,034 worth of solar panels was put in at the Calverton National Cemetery . The San Joaquin Valley National Cemetery got an $800,000 solar panel setup. The Riverside National Cemetery got a $1.3 million solar system.
“We are investing in clean energy and renewable energy projects at our national cemeteries to reduce our environmental footprint,” Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric K. Shinseki declared. ”The transition toward these renewable energy sources helps VA continue to be a leading example of going green in the federal government.”
Vets might be dying at VA facilities, but they would have solar panels and wind turbines over their graves so that Shineski could provide Obama with a leading example of “greenness”.
The cemeteries may have been where the VA's scandal of shorting care for vets ended, under the shade of solar panels and wind turbines, but it was not where it began.
The VA scandal began at the Phoenix VA Health Care System where administrators earned promotions and bonuses by shunting patients who needed treatment into fake waiting lists.
As many as 40 veterans had died while waiting for care and 1,715 veterans in the Phoenix VA Health Care System had waited more than 90 days for an appointment. A retired Navy serviceman died of bladder cancer after being put on a 7-month waiting list after blood was found in his urine. He finally received an appointment a week after his death.
But each and every year, from 2009 to 2011, the Phoenix VA Health Care System put in solar panels. The solar panels at the Carl T. Hayden VA in Phoenix cost $20 million.
That $20 million could have saved the lives of dying veterans.
In 2009, Obama had signed a Green Energy executive order. Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki had announced that "in order to continue providing Veterans with the best health care and benefit services, VA must adapt to climate change."
Not only did Global Warming have nothing to do with serving veterans, but it got in the way of the VA's central mission. While Shinseki was focused on building solar panels so the sky wouldn't fall, veterans were waiting months to see a doctor.
At some South Texas facilities vets had to wait 85 days for a primary care appointment and 55 days for a mental health appointment with "a worst-in-the-nation, 145-day average wait for new patients seeking specialist care".
One of the vets waiting for a mental health appointment, who suffered from waiting list cheating, committed suicide.
Meanwhile the South Texas Veterans Health Care System installed a 1.7 MW solar PV system.
The Amarillo VA Health Care System had the third longest wait times for mental health appointments in the country. Its Thomas E. Creek office complained of a lack of resources. Meanwhile $10 million was spent on solar panels.
Hawaii has the longest waiting list for veterans with an average of 145 days for an appointment at the Spark M. Matsunaga VA Medical Center.
Meanwhile it was spending between $1 and $2 million on a 119 KW Solar PV System.
Veterans at Kansas VAs had to wait more than 90 days. 977 never had appointments scheduled. There were 104 vets on the waiting list at the Robert J. Dole VA Medical Center in Wichita .
But while the Dole Center may not have had time for vets, it did have time to set up solar panels.
Three mental health administrators at the Malcom Randall VA Medical Center in Gainesville , Florida were suspended for keeping a waiting list for over 200 vets. Meanwhile the facility had blown between$5 and $10 million on a solar panel system.
The Raymond G. Murphy VA Medical Center put 3,000 vets on a phantom waiting list to see a doctor who doesn't see patients.
Unfortunately its $20.3 million solar setup was all too real.
The average wait time for new patients at the Carl Vinson VA Medical Center was about 57 days to see a primary care doctor. But that just gave vets more time to admire its new $1.1 million solar setup.
The Bay Pines VA Health Care System didn't schedule appointments for 1,000 vets. But it did find the time and money to put in solar panels. The Cheyenne VA Medical Center, which was caught removing vets from the waiting list, had not one, but two, million dollar solar setups.
The Sepulveda Ambulatory Care Center , which was one of three flagged facilities, was part of a $50 million VA solar panel contract.
Vets couldn't get appointments, but every VA facility was getting solar power, whether it needed it or not.
The Buffalo VA Medical Center in upstate New York , where winter is the best 8 months of the year, got solar. So did the VA center in the Bronx in New York City . The New York VA solar contracts were part of $7.8 million in solar contracts awarded to one company.
Meanwhile in Southeast Texas, the former associate chief of staff at the VA said that a cost-cutting policy had been implemented under which colonoscopies would only be approved if the patient tested positive in three successive screenings for bloody stools.
“By the time that you do the colonoscopies on these patients, you went from a stage 1 to a stage 4, which is basically inoperable,” Dr. Richard Krugman said. "That was done because of dollars and cents. For the VA, they have to be bleeding out of their rectum before they would authorize a colonoscopy."
Everyone has their priorities. Benghazi and the VA scandal happened because the men who died were a low priority compared to solar panels and buying bad art for embassies. The State Department spent millions on art for embassies and mansion renovations, but begrudged the security that would have saved four American lives. Fortunes were spent on solar panels and wind turbines for VA facilities, but veterans died of cancer to save money on a colonoscopy.
The corrupt obsession with Green Energy doesn't just waste money, it costs lives. The fanaticism of the Global Warmists in the White House led them to disregard the lives of vets because they thought that saving the world with solar panels and wind turbines was more important.
The VA's Green Management Program Office claimed that it would "keep our promises to Veterans through sustainability." Instead it focused on "Environmental Justice" and "Green Purchasing" at the expense of veterans. Solar panels went up and veterans went down.
While they were putting in wind and solar at VA facilities and cemeteries, they forgot about the veterans who had served their country and deserved better than to be sacrificed for a solar panel.
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Not quite sure where to put this
http://thefreethoughtproject.com/police-11-arrests-seize-190-pounds-unlicensed-ginseng-30000-cash/
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Not quite sure where to put this
http://thefreethoughtproject.com/police-11-arrests-seize-190-pounds-unlicensed-ginseng-30000-cash/
Tragedy of the commons?
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Regulation Is Good for Goldman
Lloyd Blankfein and Elizabeth Warren find common ground.
Feb. 11, 2015 7:27 p.m. ET
11 COMMENTS
Liberals like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) are treating the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial law as holy writ because she says it punishes the big banks. But then why is Lloyd Blankfein so content? On Tuesday at an investor conference, the Goldman Sachs CEO explained how higher regulatory costs are crushing the competition.
“More intense regulatory and technology requirements have raised the barriers to entry higher than at any other time in modern history,” said Mr. Blankfein. “This is an expensive business to be in, if you don’t have the market share in scale. Consider the numerous business exits that have been announced by our peers as they reassessed their competitive positioning and relative returns.”
Lloyd Blankfein, chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs ENLARGE
Lloyd Blankfein, chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs Photo: Bloomberg
Longer term, Mr. Blankfein sees more opportunities for global giants like Goldman to grab even more market share, as “only a handful of players” will likely be able “to effectively compete on a global basis.”
While the Goldman boss wasn’t endorsing all of the added directives from Washington, he said his bank is “prepared to have this relationship with our regulators”—and the regulators are prepared to have a deep relationship with Goldman—“for a long time.”
None of this will surprise our readers, who understand that one goal of Dodd-Frank was to turn big banks into the equivalent of financial utilities. But it is unusual to see a financial CEO like Mr. Blankfein state the effect so candidly. Goldman can afford to hire battalions of lawyers and lobbyists to commune with regulators, and no doubt some of Wall Street’s campaign contributions from its regulation-aided profits will even make it to the likes of Ms. Warren. As ever, powerful government mainly helps the powerful.
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"“More intense regulatory and technology requirements have raised the barriers to entry higher than at any other time in modern history,” said Mr. Blankfein. “This is an expensive business to be in, if you don’t have the market share in scale. Consider the numerous business exits that have been announced by our peers as they reassessed their competitive positioning and relative returns.”
The same thing is happening in health care. Regulations and profound complex technology requirements have done the same thing in health care.
The biggest thrive and everyone else struggles or goes out of business. The winners are the biggest who can pay reams of people to navigate the mazes that are laid down all over the streets and sidewalks.
Hence big pharmacies, big hospital chains, and the biggest insurers are thriving and taking over the entire health care world.
Any of us seen any savings yet?
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"“More intense regulatory and technology requirements have raised the barriers to entry higher than at any other time in modern history,” said Mr. Blankfein. “This is an expensive business to be in, if you don’t have the market share in scale. Consider the numerous business exits that have been announced by our peers as they reassessed their competitive positioning and relative returns.”
The same thing is happening in health care. Regulations and profound complex technology requirements have done the same thing in health care.
The biggest thrive and everyone struggles or goes out of business. The winners are the biggest who can pay reams of people to navigate the mazes that are laid down all over the streets and sidewalks.
Hence big pharmacies, big hospital chains, and the biggest insurers are thriving and taking over the entire health care world.
Any of us seen any savings yet?
Isn't that the truth! The rise of the giant bureaucracy is a war against entrepreneurialism and small business, right while the "market" index of entrenched companies keeps showing big gains. Big companies continually challenged by start-ups and competition is what would actually make them stronger. Health care in America is only the latest example of a country being swallowed by big government, one industry at a time.
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Doug writes,
"The rise of the giant bureaucracy is a war against entrepreneurialism and small business, right while the "market" index of entrenched companies keeps showing big gains"
Yes! And a giant expansion of the middle man growing exponentially to help with navigation and squeeze out savings. But who shares the savings? It ain't us. It is the Wall Street businesses.
Take for example the Pharmacy Benefits Managers such as Caremark. To help keep down drug costs. Sounds good but what was their market cap when they were finally swallowed up but the bigger player - CVS?
I could be wrong but I would like a real objective cost benefit analysis (actuaries?) to explain to us (Joe the plumber public) who is actually seeing the big benefits.
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Don't be fooled by the name; it's a government takeover.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/02/net-neuter-trality.php
Watch the short video.
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/mar/2/judge-rules-epa-lied-about-transparency/
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Mansour Samadpour makes his way through the supermarket like a detective working a crime scene, slow, watchful, up one aisle and down the next. A clerk mistakenly assumes that he needs help, but Mr. Samadpour brushes him off. He knows exactly what he’s doing.
He buys organic raspberries that might test positive for pesticides and a fillet of wild-caught fish that might be neither wild nor the species listed on the label. He buys beef and pork ground fresh at the market. He is disappointed that there is no caviar, which might turn out to be something cheaper than sturgeon roe. That’s an easy case to crack.
Civilian shoppers see food when they go to the market. Mr. Samadpour, the chief executive of IEH Laboratories (short for Institute for Environmental Health), sees mystery, if not downright fraud. On this visit, he is shopping for goods he can test at his labs to demonstrate to a reporter that what you see on market shelves may not be what you get.
While he’s out of the office, he receives a call and dispatches a team on a more pressing expedition: They need to buy various products that contain cumin, because a client just found possible evidence of peanuts, a powerful allergen, in a cumin-based spice mix. The client wants a definitive answer before someone gets sick.
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Testing vials of caviar samples at IEH Laboratories in Seattle. Credit Ian C. Bates for The New York Times
Suppliers, manufacturers and markets depend on Mr. Samadpour’s network of labs to test food for inadvertent contamination and deliberate fraud, or to verify if a product is organic or free of genetically modified organisms. Consumers, the last link in the chain, bet their very health on responsible practices along the way.
The annual cost of food-borne illnesses in the United States is $14.1 billion to $16.3 billion, according to a 2013 analysis by the Agriculture Department. The federal government has called for a shift from reaction, which usually means a large recall after people have fallen ill or died, to prevention, to reduce the number of such episodes. Wary customers want their food to be safe and genuine, and food retailers, who rely on a global array of suppliers, are looking for ways to protect their brands.
Food testing sits at the intersection of those desires. Mr. Samadpour, who opened IEH’s first lab in 2001 with six employees, now employs over 1,500 people at 116 labs in the United States and Europe. He refers to his company, one of the largest of its kind in the country, as “a privately financed public health organization.”
The Promise of DNA Tests
The two low-slung wooden buildings that house IEH’s labs at its base in Seattle feel more like a high school chemistry lab than the center of a national food security network; there’s an acrid smell, and the counters are crammed with vials of various shapes and colors, centrifuge machines and lined notebooks full of data entries.
This is where analysts coax DNA out of a tiny sample of whatever is being tested. For lethal threats, like E. coli 0157 in ground beef, the detection process involves a grim recipe of ground beef and a broth infused with nutrients that E. coli likes to eat, put in a warm place to rest for 10 hours — at which point a single E. coli cell, if it exists, will have spawned one million easy-to-detect siblings. For fraud cases, the process is somewhat simpler; lab technicians run a DNA test or chemical analysis to confirm a sample’s identity.
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Cheap technology has made this kind of testing possible. “Ten years ago, it would have taken millions of dollars to sequence a genome,” Mr. Samadpour says. “Now it takes $100. We do thousands a year.”
Business is booming — partly because IEH clients consider testing to be a gatekeeper defense in a multitiered food economy without borders. “We’re a lot more concerned about imports,” Mr. Samadpour says, because of “lack of accountability, lack of infrastructure, lack of a culture of food safety.” He says episodes like the 2008 discovery of the toxic chemical melamine in infant formula from China have contributed to a gradual shift in food manufacturers’ attitudes toward imports.
While the lab focuses primarily on safety issues like the cumin-and-peanut inquiry, there are enough fraud calls to support specialties among the lab technicians, like Kirthi Kutumbaka, referred to by his colleagues as “the emperor of fish” for his work on a seafood identification project. Once a fish is filleted, genetic testing is the only way to confirm its identity, making it a popular category for fraud.
IEH’s clients are primarily vendors who supply retailers and manufacturers, and they generally prefer to remain anonymous for fear of indicating to consumers that they have a specific worry about safety.
Costco is one of the retailers that use IEH’s services, and the company doesn’t mind talking about it.
“We have to inspect what we expect,” says Craig Wilson, the company’s vice president for quality assurance and food safety, meaning that products have to live up to their labels, particularly items in Costco’s own Kirkland Signature line.
Costco has a smaller margin of error than most food retailers; the company stocks only about 3,500 so-called S.K.U.s, or stock keeping units, while most retailers offer as many as 150,000. A single misstep is a far greater percentage of the whole. That’s why, in addition to retaining IEH, it operates its own 20-person testing lab.
“We’re not typical,” Mr. Wilson says. “We have one ketchup, one mayonnaise, one can of olives, Kirkland Signature olive oils and a couple of others.” Since 2003, the United States Department of Agriculture has required the testing of beef used for ground beef, resulting in a 40 percent reduction in cases of E. coli traced to beef consumption. Costco, which processes 600,000 to 700,000 pounds of ground beef daily, does extensive micro-sampling of the meat at its California facility, Mr. Wilson says.
The company expects its suppliers to absorb testing costs and gets no resistance, given the size of the resulting orders. Costco sells 157,000 rotisserie chickens a day. As Mr. Wilson put it: “If vendors get a bill for a couple hundred bucks on a $1 million order, who cares? They don’t.”
The sheer volume also enables Costco to demand action when there is a problem. After a 2006 outbreak of E. coli tied to Earthbound Farm’s ready-to-eat bagged spinach, in which three people died and more than 200 became ill, Mr. Wilson, one of Earthbound’s customers, instituted what he calls a “bag and hold” program for all of Costco’s fresh greens suppliers. He required the suppliers to test their produce and not ship it until they had the results of the tests.
Earthbound responded to the outbreak with a “multihurdle program that places as many barriers to food-borne illness as we can,” says Gary Thomas, the company’s senior vice president for integrated supply chain. Earthbound now conducts 200,000 tests annually on its ready-to-eat greens.
Not everyone was as quick to embrace change; some growers were concerned about losing shelf life while they waited for results. Mr. Wilson was unmoved by that argument. “If you can test and verify microbial safety, what do I care if I lose shelf life?” he says.
The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2011, intended to improve food safety practices, has been mired in missed deadlines, which have been attributed to food-industry concerns about overregulation and to an unrealistic timeline given the scope of the overhaul. The delays led to a lawsuit by the Center for Food Safety and the Center for Environmental Health, two advocacy groups. The F.D.A. and the Office of Management and Budget now operate under a court-ordered schedule that requires regulations to be issued in late 2015 and 2016.
The F.D.A. currently stops short of requiring produce tests, although it conducts its own “surveillance sampling,” according to Juli Putnam, an agency spokeswoman. The agency sees two drawbacks to mandatory tests: “A negative product test result does not necessarily indicate the absence of a hazard,” Ms. Putnam wrote in an email, because contamination might show up in another part of a field, and conducting more tests would increase the costs that are passed on to the consumer.
The agency is focused instead on defining minimum safety standards for “potential sources of microbiological contamination such as agricultural water, worker health and hygiene and animals in the growing area,” she wrote (though some preventive testing is conducted on sprouts).
DNATrek, a newcomer to the field, sees opportunity in another aspect of food safety testing: the need to quickly pinpoint the source of a pathogen outbreak, to avoid delays and unnecessarily broad recalls. Anthony Zografos, the company’s chief executive, says it soon plans to introduce a test called DNATrax, which will be able to identify the source of contaminated produce within an hour, narrowing recall efforts “to a specific field or packer or distributor.” The test relies on tracer DNA that is dissolved in the liquid coating applied to many types of produce after harvest or added to prepared foods; it provides a unique genetic fingerprint.
George Farquar, a chemist and Mr. Zografos’s partner in the company, was looking for ways to trace airborne contaminants as part of a national security project financed by the Defense Department when he realized that the work could be applied to food safety. He and Mr. Zografos licensed the technology from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he was conducting the research, and it will receive royalties from sales of the test. Mr. Zografos says that DNATrax will offer traceability for most types of field produce at a price of about $1 for 1,000 pounds.
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Tracking Down Fraud
Food safety is a yes-or-no proposition — either there is a contaminant or there isn’t. Food fraud, a smaller segment of the universe of problem foods, is harder to detect because it can take so many forms. Fish from a country whose imports have been banned might arrive at the market labeled with a different country of origin, honey might be cut with cheaper extenders, and saffron might not even be saffron.
When asked if fake food has ever crossed the threshold at Costco, Mr. Wilson smiles and says, “I’m going to go with ‘no,’ but you’re not going to believe me entirely. Yes, there have been egregious things, and we’ve taken care of them, and that’s that.”
Olive oil is a popular target for fraud because there are several ways to charge more for less. Compliance with United States Department of Agriculture quality standards for extra-virgin olive oil is voluntary. Unless a supplier pays for testing, passes and puts a U.S.D.A.-certified sticker on the bottle, consumers have no way to know whether they got extra-virgin olive oil. Any grade of olive oil can be doctored with cheap filler oils like canola, because they have no flavor. And the country of origin listed on the label isn’t always where the contents are from.
About five years ago, Mr. Wilson decided it was time to send an employee to Tuscany to collect leaves from Tuscan olive trees. Costco now has an index of DNA information on “all the cultivars of Tuscan olive oil, about 16 different ones,” he says. “When they harvest and press, we do our DNA testing.”
A group of undergraduates at the University of California, Davis, has developed the OliView, a biosensor that can detect rancid or adulterated olive oil. They expect to have the device ready for sale, at $60 to $80, in 18 months to two years. “At the supermarket level, we found that a lot of times the oil was just old and rancid,” says Selina Wang, research director at the U.C. Davis Olive Center and one of the students’ advisers, “but there were also samples labeled extra virgin that were actually a little bit of virgin olive oil mixed with refined olive oil.”
Adulterated oil, more common among imports, can stump even food professionals. Ms. Wang says that at the center, they “have seen samples with as much as 70 percent canola oil.”
DNATrek has also developed a test for products where fraud is a temptation — “high-value stuff, truffles, saffron, premium juices, honey, seafood and olive oil,” Mr. Zografos says.
Mr. Samadpour says that in multi-ingredient products, the source of trickery is usually hidden further down the food chain than the name on the package. “It’s not the top people who get involved in economic adulteration,” he says. “It’s someone lower down who sees a way to save a penny here or there. Maybe it’s 2 or 3 cents, but if you sell a million units, that’s $20,000 to $30,000.”
Consumer Vigilance
As with most expanding technologies, there are believers and skeptics. David Gombas, senior vice president for food safety and technology at the 111-year-old United Fresh Produce Association, echoes the position of the Food and Drug Administration: Testing is not a sufficient answer for his members, who include anyone engaged in the fresh produce industry, “from guys who come up with seeds to growers, shippers, fresh-cut processors, restaurants and grocery stores, everyone from beginning to end,” from small organic farms to Monsanto.
Their common ground, he says, is a commitment to food safety — but members disagree on how to achieve it, including Mr. Gombas and Mr. Samadpour, who are both microbiologists. “Microbiological testing provides a false sense of security,” Mr. Gombas says. “They can find one dead salmonella cell on a watermelon, but what does that tell you about the rest of the watermelon in the field? Nothing.”
Testing has its place, he says, but as backup for “good practices and environmental monitoring,” which includes things as diverse as employee hygiene and site visits. “I’m a fan of testing,” he says, “if something funny’s going on.” Otherwise, he has taken on the role of contrarian. “People think testing means something. When I say it doesn’t, they smile, nod and keep testing.”
Mr. Samadpour says sampling “can reduce the risk tremendously but can never 100 percent eliminate it,” but he will take a tremendous reduction over a food crisis any day. The government’s “indirect” stance, which mandates safety but does not require testing, allows companies to interpret safe practices on “a spectrum,” he says, “from bare minimum to sophisticated programs,” and he worries about safety at the low end of that range.
He says consumer vigilance is the best defense against the selling of groceries under bare minimum standards.
IEH tested the contents of Mr. Samadpour’s grocery cart:
The organic raspberries showed 0.12 parts per million of spinosyn A, an insecticide with a tolerance limit of 0.035 p.p.m. on organic crops and 0.7 p.p.m on nonorganic berries. Mr. Samadpour assumed that was the result of an errant breeze from a nearby nonorganic field.
The beef and pork were cross-contaminated — each had amounts of the other — a common occurrence, he says, when markets grind first one batch of meat and then the other. These were small amounts as well, but their presence could upset a Muslim or Jewish customer who does not eat pork, or a Hindu who does not eat beef. The fish was what the label said it was.
As for the cumin and the peanuts, the F.D.A. posted a handful of product recalls, all of them involving cumin and peanuts, including Kellogg’s MorningStar Farms chipotle black bean burgers, which Mr. Wilson removed from Costco’s shelves.
The recalls continued for weeks, until the F.D.A. issued a blanket statement “advising people who are highly allergic to peanuts to consider avoiding products that contain ground cumin or cumin powder, because some shipments of these products have tested positive for undeclared peanut protein. People who are highly allergic or sensitive to peanuts may be at risk of a serious or life-threatening allergic reaction.”
Inside the labs, reaction was more world-weary than panicked; this was business as usual.
“Other than the label somebody’s written,” Mr. Farquar says, “you really have no idea where your food’s coming from.”
Mr. Samadpour, having been at this far longer, is more philosophical. “I eat street food when I travel,” he says. “One can’t become a microbe-phobe.”
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Many charts and graphs in the original
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The Regulatory State - Central Planning and Bureaucracy on a Rampage
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The New 10,000 Commandments Report – It’s Worse than Ever
Before we begin, we should mention that the US economy has long been one of the least regulated among the major regulatory States of the so-called “free” world, and to a large extent this actually still remains true. This introductory remark should give readers an idea of how terrible the situation is in many of the socialist Utopias elsewhere.
Even in the US though, today’s economic system is light years away from free market capitalism or anything even remotely resembling a “laissez faire” system. We are almost literally drowning in regulations. The extent of this regulatory Moloch and that the very real costs it imposes is seriously retarding economic progress. It is precisely as Bill Bonner recently said: the government’s main job is to look toward the future in order to prevent it from happening.
A great many of today’s regulations have only one goal: to protect established interest groups. Regulations that are ostensibly detrimental to certain unpopular corporatist interests are no different. Among these is e.g. the truly monstrous and nigh impenetrable thicket of financial rules invented after the 2008 crash in a valiant effort to close the barn door long after the horse had escaped. They are unlikely to bother the established large banking interests in the least. The banking cartel is probably elated that it has become virtually impossible for start-ups to ever seriously compete with it. The same is true of many other business regulations; their main effect is to protect the biggest established companies from competition.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) – evidently named after a species close to extinction – has just released its 2015 report on the regulatory State, entitled “The 10,000 Commandments” (download link at the end of the article). Here is a summary of the grisly highlights (now would be a good time to get the barf bags out):
“Federal regulation and intervention cost American consumers and businesses an estimated $1.88 trillion in 2014 in lost economic productivity and higher prices.
If U.S. federal regulation was a country, it would be the world’s 10th largest economy, ranking behind Russia and ahead of India.
Economy-wide regulatory costs amount to an average of $14,976 per household – around 29 percent of an average family budget of $51,100. Although not paid directly by individuals, this “cost” of regulation exceeds the amount an average family spends on health care, food and transportation.
The “Unconstitutionality Index” is the ratio of regulations issued by unelected agency officials compared to legislation enacted by Congress in a given year. In 2014, agencies issued 16 new regulations for every law — that’s 3,554 new regulations compared to 224 new laws.
Many Americans complain about taxes, but regulatory compliance costs exceed what the IRS is expected to collect in both individual and corporate income taxes for last year—by more than $160 billion.
Some 60 federal departments, agencies and commissions have 3,415 regulations in development at various stages in the pipeline. The top six federal rule making agencies account for 48 percent of all federal regulations. These are the Departments of the Treasury, Commerce, Interior, Health and Human Services and Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency.
The 2014 Federal Register contains 77,687 pages, the sixth highest page count in its history. Among the six all-time-high Federal Register total page counts, five occurred under President Obama.
The George W. Bush administra¬tion averaged 62 major regulations annually over eight years, while the Obama administration has averaged 81 major regulations annually over six years.
(emphasis added)
Look at it and weep: the estimated cost of federal regulations and interventions alone in 2015 – click to enlarge.
If one adds taxes and the damage done by the Fed’s incessant money printing to these regulatory costs, it is a miracle the economy hasn’t imploded yet. Note the deeply undemocratic nature of the regulatory process: The vast majority of the rules – all of which have the power of law – is concocted by unelected bureaucrats in the form of “administrative law”. It would otherwise simply be impossible to make up thousands of new rules every year. As unproductive as the bureaucracy is, it is still smothering the economy with this onslaught. This will probably never change, unless the entire system collapses one day. After all, the people tasked with making the rules need something to do.
The cost of federal regulation per US household, compared to various major household expenditure items – click to enlarge.
Growing Like a Weed
A look at the Federal Register shows that the growth in regulations is essentially a permanent feature. There are no longer any significant time periods during which the number of rules actually declines. It is probably no coincidence that the charts below are eerily reminiscent of charts showing total federal debt or charts depicting the growth in the money supply. The only thing that is no longer showing any respectable growth is the economy. Of course, no-one should be surprised by this.
Federal Register pages per decade. One wonders how people survived the practically lawless 1940 – 1970 period. Note that if we were to go back in time by another 30 years, we would see that the federal government wasn’t even a footnote in most people’s lives.
Over the past 22 years, almost 91,000 final rules and regulations were published cumulatively. We are just guessing here, but we believe that between the time the average citizen gets out of bed until shortly after he has slurped his morning coffee, he has violated at least five laws or regulations already – click to enlarge.
Cumulative regulations published in the Federal Register – almost 91,000 in the past 22 years alone – click to enlarge.
Monetary costs are just one aspect to this. There is also the wasted effort and psychic cost that is incurred when people realize that there are many things they simply cannot do, even though they would harm no-one and would actually provide a service to their fellow men. It will often prove extremely difficult to fight the red tape and still establish a successful business venture at the same time. Certain sectors of the economy have been closed off to the private sector completely (see the example of roads below). Very often start-ups with little capital cannot hope to compete in certain business sectors, as the regulatory obstacles are simply impossible to overcome.
Recently a US trucking organization has penned a manifesto in which it is bitterly complaining about crumbling roads and bridges across the US and urging the government to “do something”. The authors should take a long, hard look at their sad collection of statistics and realize that this is what actually happens when the government monopolizes a sector of the economy.
Another aspect is of course social control. By making a criminal or a potential criminal out of everybody, the mountain of laws and regulations can always be brought to bear against citizens or organizations that have somehow displeased government officials or managed to attract their wrath. One can see a variation of this principle at work in modern-day criminal court cases. People who are indicted for a crime are usually faced with a whole plethora of charges apart from the main charge. The intention is to force them to accept a plea deal whether or not they are innocent. The point is obviously not to serve the cause of justice.
However, we don’t want to digress too much here. The purely economic cost on which the CEI report focuses is distressing enough all by itself. One only has to think the problem properly through. Similar to other government interventions such as interest rate and money supply manipulations by the central bank, these enormous costs hamper the economy to such an extent that economic progress is slowed to a crawl. Who knows what we could have achieved by now if this were not the case? Perhaps people would already be able to reach the ripe old age of 150 and still feel like spring chickens in their early 100ds. Concerns over material well-being that continue to bedevil so many people today may already be orders of magnitude smaller. As Israel Kirzner once remarked in this context:
“We are not able to chart the future of capitalism in any specificity. Our reason for this incapability is precisely that which assures us . . . the economic future of capitalism will be one of progress and advance. The circumstance that precludes our viewing the future of capitalism as a determinate one is the very circumstance in which, with entrepreneurship at work, we are no longer confined by any scarcity framework.”
However, for this to be true, free market capitalism must be able to breathe. We won’t be able to enjoy the fruits of entrepreneurship if it is smothered at every opportunity.
Conclusion
As revolting as the full picture is, we recommend reading the entire “10,000 Commandments” report, which can bedownloaded here (pdf). Above we show only a very small selection of the charts and data contained in the complete report. One thing should be clear to everyone reading it: This is a major problem that deserves a lot more attention than it usually seems to get.
Charts by: Competitive Enterprise Institute
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/08/08/nyc-government-agency-goes-to-court-to-fire-employee-for-missing-18-months-of-work-but-apparently-they-never-learned-one-crucial-detail/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Firewire&utm_campaign=Firewire%20-%20HORIZON%208-9-15%20FINAL
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FORT BRIDGER, Wyo. — The sun was sinking and the brook trout were biting, so Andy Johnson and his daughter Aspen, 6, stepped onto their sun-bleached pier, hooked some mealworms and cast their lines into the most infamous pond in the West.
It is just a splotch of placid water amid endless ripples of grazing land here in western Wyoming. But in the two years since Mr. Johnson dammed a small creek running through his front yard to create the pond, it has become an emblem for conservative groups and local governments that are fighting what Senator Michael B. Enzi called a “regulatory war” with the Obama administration over environmental issues ranging from water quality to gas drilling, coal power plants to sage grouse.
“It makes no sense whatsoever,” Mr. Johnson said, pointing at the waving grasses and birds pinwheeling around the water. “We have wetlands now. I really think the E.P.A. should be coming in and saying, ‘Good job.’”
The pond battle has pitted Mr. Johnson, a 32-year-old welder, part-time barbecue caterer and father of four girls, against a federal bureaucracy that is, in the best of times, grudgingly tolerated out here. It erupted after officials from the Environmental Protection Agency paid a visit to the pond and, Mr. Johnson said, told him that he was facing “a very serious matter.”
Mr. Johnson dammed a small creek running through his front yard to create the pond for his cattle to drink from. He said it had become an oasis for birds and wildlife. Credit Kim Raff for The New York Times
In a January 2014 violation notice, the agency said Mr. Johnson had violated the Clean Water Act by digging out Six Mile Creek and dumping in tons of river rocks without getting necessary federal permits. The agency ordered him to take steps to restore the creek under the supervision of environmental officials, or face accumulating fines of as much as $37,500 a day.
Mr. Johnson refused.
He argued that he had gotten full approvals from Wyoming officials, and said the federal government had no business using national water laws to make decisions about the creek that meanders through the family’s eight-acre property. Mr. Johnson and his wife, Katie, had spent $50,000 — most of their savings, they said — to create the pond to water their 10 head of cattle and four horses. Dismantling it now would be ruinously expensive and destroy what has become a tiny oasis for birds and wildlife, they said.
After more than a year of unsuccessful negotiations, the standoff veered into a federal courthouse last month when Mr. Johnson sued the E.P.A., asking a judge to declare his pond legal and wave away accumulating fines of as much as $16 million.
“They have no right to be here,” Mr. Johnson said. “We’re law-abiding people. It makes your blood boil that they would come after you like that.”
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100 miles
MONTANA
YELLOWSTONE
NATIONAL PARK
90
WYOMING
287
25
Fort
Bridger
80
Cheyenne
UTAH
COLORADO
By The New York Times
The suit argues that the pond is exempt from the Clean Water Act because it was created to water stock. Further, it says the creek is too far removed from navigable rivers to fall under the E.P.A.’s authority.
The case has drawn support from conservative leaders around the state. Wyoming’s Republican senators, Mr. Enzi and John Barrasso, called the agency’s action “heavy-handed bureaucracy.”
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“What did they do wrong?” Representative Cynthia M. Lummis, Republican of Wyoming, said in an interview, referring to the Johnsons. “What does the E.P.A. intend to gain? What wrong are they trying to right by imposing fines on these people?”
A libertarian legal group called the Pacific Legal Foundation began representing Mr. Johnson at no charge.
“We can’t have unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats ignoring the limits of their own authority,” said Jonathan Wood, a lawyer for the foundation. “There was no need for federal regulation here.”
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Mr. Johnson, with his daughter Brookley, said state officials had approved his pond. Credit Kim Raff for The New York Times
In a statement, the E.P.A. said it had been “attempting to work cooperatively” with Mr. Johnson and added that it had not yet imposed any fines on him. The agency declined to say anything further, citing the lawsuit.
While the Johnsons watch trout jump in Wyoming, more than two dozen states and energy and farm groups are waging a similar fight, arguing that the E.P.A. went too far when it adopted a rule clarifying its authority to oversee smaller streams and wetlands. After 13 states sued, a federal judge in North Dakota temporarily blocked the new water rule from taking effect across much of the West.
But other states and many environmental groups have welcomed more federal control of state waters, saying that a confusing patchwork of rules had left small bodies of water vulnerable to pollution. In Wyoming, for example, some conservation groups criticized a state decision that reclassified thousands of miles of smaller streams to allow up to five times the level of E. coli bacteria.
States and landowners often argue that they are the ones best suited to preserve their own land and water. In Wyoming, officials point to requirements that drillers test for baseline groundwater quality, and to measures protecting sage grouse — rules that have been lauded by the Interior Department.
In Fort Bridger, Mr. Johnson points to his own pond. Since creating it, he and his family have seen blue herons and an eagle, moose and muskrat come to drink, and it is full of trout. (The Johnsons say they only catch and release.) Water flows in from the west, and out and back into the creek over a sloping spillway of river rocks that Mr. Johnson dumped into the channel.
A private report he commissioned found only positive environmental results. But the E.P.A.’s violation notice described the rocks, sand and concrete he used to create the dam and spillway as pollutants.
As the fight wore on, Mr. Johnson sold off most of his livestock to pay for legal costs and environmental studies. All that is left are one steer, a donkey and a Shetland pony to drink from their own private, bitterly contested watering hole.
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The VW “Scandal”
by eric • September 23, 2015
This could kill VW – until recently (until last week) the world’s largest car company.
But unlike say the exploding Pinto fiasco this is not a story about defective cars. It is a story about defective public policy.
None of the VW cars now in the crosshairs are unreliable, dangerous or shoddily built. They were simply programmed to give their owners best-case fuel economy and performance. Software embedded within each vehicle’s computer – which monitors and controls the operation of the engine – would furtively adjust those parameters slightly to sneak by emissions tests when the vehicle was plugged in for testing. But once out on the road, the calibrations would revert to optimal – for mileage and performance.
Now, the hysterical media accounts of the above make it seem that the alteration via code of the vehicles’ exhaust emissions was anything but slight. Shrill cries of up to “40 times” the “allowable maximum” echo across the land.
Well, true.
But, misleading.
Because not defined – put in context.
What is the “allowable maximum”?
It is a very small number.
Less than 1 percent of the total volume of the car’s exhaust. We are talking fractions of percentages here. Which is why talk of “40 percent” is so misleading and, frankly, deliberately dishonest.
Left out of context, the figure sounds alarming. As in 40 percent of 100 percent.
As opposed to 40 percent of the remaining unscrubbed 1-3 percent or .05 percent or whatever it is (depending on the specific “harmful” byproduct being belabored).
The truth – explained rarely, for reasons that will become obvious – is that the emissions of new cars (and recent-vintage cars) have been so thoroughly cleaned up they hardly exist at all. Catalytic converters (and especially “three way” catalytic converters with oxygen sensors) and fuel injection alone eliminated about two-thirds of the objectionable effluvia from the exhaust stream – and they’ve been around since the 1980s. Most of the remaining third was dealt with during the ’90s, via more precise forms of fuel delivery (port fuel injection replaced throttle body fuel injection) and more sophisticated engine computers capable of real-time monitoring and adjustment of parameters, and of alerting the vehicle’s owner to the need for a check (OBD II).
Since the late ’90s/early 2000s, the industry has been chasing diminishing returns. The remaining 3 percent or so of the exhaust stream that’s not been “controlled.”
You may begin to see the problem here.
Internal combustion is always going to produce some emissions. The engineers have picked the low hanging (and mid-hanging) fruit. But the EPA insists on what amounts to a zero emissions internal combustion engine.
Which, of course, is impossible.
Which may be just the point.
Set unattainable standards – then denounce the victim for “noncompliance.”
VW’s sin was trying to get diesels that people would want to buy into the showrooms. These would be diesels that went farther than an otherwise-equivalent gas-engined car on a gallon of fuel to offset the higher up-front cost of buying the diesel-powered vehicle. Or at least, far enough – relative to the gas-engined equivalent – to justify the price premium.
People also expected – demanded – that the vehicles perform. That they accelerate when the accelerator is pushed.
VW set the calibrations to deliver those things. The operating characteristics its customers want.
VW is in hot water because of that. Because it put customers – rather than government – first.
No one has alleged that any of the “affected” vehicles runs poorly. The fact is they run better than they would have if VW had set the calibrations to appease the implacable EPA.
Which will never be appeased until we’re all driving $60,000 “zero emissions” electric cars we can’t afford. Which will put most of us into public (that is, government) transport. If we’re transported at all. Probably, we’ll be herded into urban cores, stacked like proles – for the sake of “the environment.”
It is a tragedy of stupidity and maliciousness and engineering ignorance.
Consider, for instance, the fact that if it were not for federal “safety” mandates, VW (and other car companies) would be able to sell vehicles hundreds of pounds lighter than the current average. Which, in turn, would allow for smaller engines – which burn less fuel. Which, in turn produce a lesser volume of exhaust. Even if a hypothetical 1,600 pound ultra-light vehicle’s exhaust stream were, let’s say, 2 percent “dirtier” than a current 2,300 pound EPA (and DOT) approved “safety” car’s, if the ultra-light burns 40 percent less fuel, its total output is still much lower than then government-approved car’s.
But such cars (the ultra-lights) have – effectively – been legislated out of existence.
At the same time, the cars that may still be manufactured are required to meet increasingly unattainable standards, putting the manufacturers (like VW) in the position of manufacturing government-compliant cars that cost too much and perform poorly that few will want to buy… or “cheating” the government, in order to build cars people will actually want to buy.
What’s happening to VW could have come right out of Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s cumbersome but nonetheless predictive novel of 50 years ago. VW cast as the real-life version of Rearden Steel.
Some inside baseball: Mazda has been trying to get its Sky-D diesel engine EPA-compliant (while also customer-viable) for the past two years, without success so far. You are denied this 50-plus MPG (and extremely clean) diesel because of the particulate jihadists in Washington.
Remember: In neither case (VW or Mazda) are we talking about a return to the LA of the early ’70s, a feasting on lead chip paints and bathing in DDT. It’s all a bogey at this point. A straw man. A phantom, meant to scare you. But it has no reality.
The “emissions problem” has been solved – decades ago. But the EPA, et al, cannot admit this.
Because then there’d be no need for the EPA.
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https://reason.com/blog/2015/10/08/federal-employees-wages-growing-faster-t
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https://reason.com/blog/2015/10/08/federal-employees-wages-growing-faster-t
Federal civilian workers had an average wage of $84,153 in 2014,
Not noted in the numbers, my brother in law retired from the federal government in his 40s with the full retirement package.
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http://www.dineshdsouza.com/news/wapo-inspector-general-issues-alert-over-6-billion-in-missing-state-dept-money/
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Obamanomics in Catastrophic Action
How Obama's new mortgage program is steering America toward another housing-market collapse.
January 22, 2016 - John Perazzo - Frontpagemag.com
Remember a few years ago, when the American housing market collapsed as a direct result of government policies that—in the name of racial justice—pressured banks to approve mortgage loans for massive numbers of underqualified nonwhite applicants? Remember how that collapse set in motion the financial crisis that then-presidential candidate Barack Obama repeatedly called “the worst economy since the Great Depression”? And remember how Obama—who had long been a leading proponent of precisely the policies that had triggered the crisis—cast himself as the savior who was going to restore fiscal sanity and untangle the whole big mess?
Well, now Savior Obama and his White House are excitedly introducing Americans to their latest brainchild, the “HomeReady” mortgage program—offered through Fannie Mae and designed to help borrowers in “low-income” and “high-minority” census tracts. “For the first time,” boasts Fannie Mae, “income from a non-borrower household member [e.g., a roommate or family member] can be considered to determine an applicable debt-to-income ratio for the loan.” And if those combined incomes aren't enough to qualify an applicant for a mortgage loan, HomeReady comes with additional built-in “flexibilities” like “allowing income from non-occupant borrowers, such as parents.” In other words, just keep rounding up everyone you know, until you can scrape together a 3% down payment and show a combined income that's high enough to qualify for an individual loan. This makes the slipshod lending standards that caused the crisis of 2008 look exacting by comparison.
What about minority applicants with bad credit? No problem there, either! As Investor's Business Daily notes, “You can qualify with a FICO credit score as low as 620, which is subprime.” In fact, even the term “subprime loan”—meaning a loan that has a high interest rate and less favorable terms in order to compensate the lender for the high credit risk incurred—has received a thorough makeover from Obama & Company. From now on, such transactions are going to be called “alternative loans.” See? No more “subprime” crises—ever again! Ain't it grand?
The government policies that led to the housing market collapse of 2008 initially emerged in the mid-1970s, when Democrats in Congress began a campaign to help low-income minorities become homeowners. This led to the passage, in 1977, of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), a mandate for banks to make special efforts to seek out and lend to borrowers of meager means. Founded on the premise that government intervention is necessary to counteract the fundamentally racist and inequitable nature of American society and the free market, the CRA was eventually transformed from an outreach effort into a strict quota system by the Clinton administration. Under the new arrangement, if a bank failed to meet its quota for loans to low-income minorities, it ran the risk of getting a low CRA rating from the FDIC. This, in turn, could derail the bank's efforts to expand, relocate, merge, etc. From a practical standpoint, then, banks had no recourse but to drastically lower their standards on down-payments and underwriting, and to approve many loans even to borrowers with weak credit credentials. As Hoover Institution Fellow Thomas Sowell explains, this led to “skyrocketing rates of mortgage delinquencies and defaults,” and the rest is history.
The CRA was by no means the only mechanism designed by government to impose race-based lending quotas on financial institutions. For instance, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) instituted rules encouraging lenders to dramatically hike their loan-approval rates for minority applicants and began bringing legal actions against mortgage bankers who failed to do so, regardless of the reason. Moreover, HUD pressured Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two largest sources of housing finance in the United States, to earmark a steeply rising number of their own loans for low-income borrowers. Many of these were subprime mortgages.
Additional pressure was applied by community organizations like ACORN, which routinely and frivolously accused banks of engaging in racially discriminatory lending practices that violated the mandates of the CRA. These groups often sued banks to prevent them from expanding or merging as they wished. Barack Obama, ACORN's committed ally, was strongly in favor of this practice. In a 1994 class-action lawsuit against Citibank, Obama represented ACORN in demanding more favorable terms for subprime homebuyer mortgages. After four years of being dragged through the mud, a beleaguered Citibank—anxious to put an end to the incessant smears (charging racism) that Obama and his fellow litigators were hurling in its direction (to say nothing of its mounting legal bills)—agreed to settle the case.
Forbes magazine puts it bluntly: “Obama has been a staunch supporter of the CRA throughout his public life.” In other words, he has long advocated the very policies that reduced the real-estate market to rubble. And now, because he is a socialist ideologue who reveres big-government interventionism and deplores the free market, he is actively pushing those very same practices again.
Obama claims, of course, to be motivated only by a desire to help downtrodden minorities get a fair shake. But in practice, his approach has served only to devastate those purported “beneficiaries.” For example, by 2009, as a result of the government policies that had brought about the housing crisis, the median net worth of black and Hispanic households nationwide had declined by 53% and 66%, respectively—whereas white net worth had fallen by a mere 16%. These disparities, explains the Federal Reserve, were largely due to the fact that African Americans and Hispanics—“because of their comparatively poor credit ratings”—were disproportionately represented among those who had fallen into the financial trap of the subprime mortgages encouraged by the CRA and similar government policies.
It's a story we've seen many times: Leftist masterminds come up with a scheme to bring “justice” to the downtrodden. But when the dust eventually settles, there is only misery all around.
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I thought when foreigners were in another country they were subject to the laws of that country. Britain has gone stupid. We cannot let this happen here period:
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/01/24/wives-with-benefits-uk-immigrants-with-more-than-one-spouse-get-extra-payments-under-new-reforms/
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That would be better in the Islam in Europe thread.
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The End of Their World
Originally published at the Washington Times
700 days. That’s roughly how long it has taken the Department of Veterans Affairs to seek the firing of three senior officials at the Phoenix VA who oversaw the systematic falsification of wait times for appointments. And that’s how long they could continue to receive full pay before the VA actually succeeds in firing them.
It has been almost years since President Obama promised swift action and accountability for those who tried to hide the abysmally long waits by keeping fraudulent records. Since those revelations, the trickle of horror stories out of the VA--of the thousands who may have died waiting for care, for instance--has become a sadly familiar fixture of newscasts.
Yet that does not make it any less outrageous that it took the VA until this week--two years after the stories of corruption at the Phoenix VA came to public attention--for the agency to finally hold the senior officials responsible.
“These executives will no longer serve in those positions,” the Arizona Republic reported, “but may fight their removals under a federal appeals process.” That could take an additional two years.
Federal civil service law gives the officials the chance to appeal the attempt to remove them from their jobs--and during that time they may continue to be paid at taxpayer expense. At least one of the officials earns a salary of nearly $250,000 a year, according to the report. This means taxpayers are likely to pay half a million dollars to a person they’re trying to fire for cause.
The crushing fact, of course, is that the real problem is much bigger than three employees at the Phoenix VA. The system that shaped them remains just as incompetent and corrupt as ever.
Consider, for example, that between 2006 and 2013, the number of full-time employees jumped more than 40 percent, from 220,000 to 314,000. Yet with 94,000 additional government employees, the VA still has not developed a system to transfer a veteran’s medical records from the Defense Department to the VA faster than 175 days.
The two giant bureaucracies recently spent $1.3 billion to build a joint medical record system for their health care services--before the two secretaries announced that they were abandoning the effort because they couldn’t get it to work. (That $1.3 billion is on top of the more than $2 billion the Defense Department spent on a failed upgrade of its own system of electronic medical records.)
But to single out the VA for its failures makes just a little more sense than pointing to the employees in Phoenix. Because in addition to a Veterans Health Service that is dangerous to veterans’ health, we have an Internal Revenue Service that attempts to police political speech, a defense bureaucracy that can’t keep track of its money or its equipment, an Environmental Protection Agency that spills millions of gallons of toxic water into the Colorado River, and an immigration bureaucracy that ignores immigration law as a matter of policy.
No wonder, then, that the public is “angry” and of a mind to vote against anyone associated with Washington. It’s the only rational response to incompetence and corruption of this scale.
And no wonder, then, that the slogan “Make America Great Again” resonates with voters. At least it signals an understanding that something fundamental has to change.
And no wonder, then, that we are witnessing the left wing react with outrage and violence. They understand the stakes. Bureaucratic socialism itself is at risk. A government that worked would mean the end of their world.
Your Friend,
Newt
P
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GDP would be 25% higher if regulations were frozen at 1980 levels. Over-regulation has cost us an estimated 72 trillion dollars over the last 36 years. I will try to follow up with links and math.
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GDP would be 25% higher if regulations were frozen at 1980 levels. Over-regulation has cost us an estimated 72 trillion dollars over the last 36 years. I will try to follow up with links and math.
We lose more money to regulations than 192 of the other 195 countries produce in total GDP.
(http://www.investors.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/EDIT3-regu-042616-768x532.jpg)
http://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/the-shockingly-high-price-of-federal-regulations/
Study: GDP Would Be 25% Bigger If Government Regulations Had Been Capped In 1980
A new study finds that the federal regulations enacted since 1980 wiped out $4 trillion from GDP in 2012 alone. (MathKnight/wikipedia)
4/26/2016
Red Tape: Economists scratch their heads when asked to explain the economy’s tepid growth over the past several years. A new study gives a possible answer: the growing, cumulative burden of federal regulations.
Under President Obama, annual GDP growth never once even hit 3%. Under Bush before him, there were only two years when growth topped 3%. But in the two decades before that, annual GDP growth was above 3% in all but six years.
Growth has been so anemic for so long, we’re now being told that this is the “new normal.” As the Bureau of Labor Statistics put it, “annual U.S. GDP growth exceeding 3% … is not expected to be attainable over the coming decade.” It lists everything as a cause, except for one thing: federal regulations.
Whenever a new regulation gets passed, the government puts out a cost analysis, which focuses on annual compliance costs. That’s fine for a point in time. But these regulations don’t go away. And every year more get added to the pile. The Code of Federal Regulations is now more than 81,000 pages long.
What’s the cumulative impact of all these rules, EDIT3-regu-042616regulations and mandates over several decades? A new study by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University tries to get an answer, and what it found is mind-boggling.
The paper looked at regulations imposed since 1977 on 22 different industries, their actual growth, and what might have happened if all those regulations had not been imposed.
What it found is that if the regulatory state had remained frozen in place in 1980, the economy would have been $4 trillion — or 25% — bigger than it was in 2012. That’s equal to almost $13,000 per person in that one year alone.
Looked at another way, if the economic growth lost to regulation in the U.S. were its own country, it would be the fourth largest economy in the world, as the nearby chart shows.
The authors — Patrick McLaughlin, Bentley Coffey, and Pietro Peretto — are quick to point out that this calculation includes only the costs of complying with federal regulations, not benefits — like cleaner air, safer workplaces, etc. — that don’t show up in the GDP numbers.
Still, does anyone really think that we are getting $4 trillion worth of benefits from federal regulations today?
Bad as this picture is, it has only gotten much, much worse since 2012, as President Obama has embarked on a regulatory free-for-all since winning re-election. While his administration imposed 172 “economically significant” regulations in Obama’s first terms, it’s added another 200 since then. The pace of regulations under this president far exceeds those of either Bush or Clinton. At the end of last year, Obama had imposed 85 more than Clinton and 100 more than Bush. Plus, the scale of Obama’s regulations are arguably far grander than his predecessors, including the entire health care industry, the banking and financial services industry, and the overbearing carbon emission rules.
Yet, mysteriously, this massive and growing regulatory burden on the private sector never comes up when the discussion turns to underwhelming economic growth. Instead, we hear about “headwinds” and the lingering effects of the financial crisis.
The authors say their findings suggest “that a wide-scale review of regulations … would deliver not only lower compliance costs but also a substantially higher economic growth rate.”
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I bet Hong Kong and Singapore would rate much lower on regulation.
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I bet Hong Kong and Singapore would rate much lower on regulation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqh0zXSd4vc
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqh0zXSd4vc[/youtube]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmuTTeESEs4
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmuTTeESEs4[/youtube]
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I bet Hong Kong and Singapore would rate much lower on regulation.
Heritage Index of Economic Freedom, 2016
1. Hong Kong
2. Singapore
...
11. USA
http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking
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I bet Hong Kong and Singapore would rate much lower on regulation.
Heritage Index of Economic Freedom, 2016
1. Hong Kong
2. Singapore
...
11. USA
http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking
http://news.rthk.hk/rthk/en/component/k2/1255403-20160419.htm
http://www.gov.sg/factually/content/unemployment-in-singapore
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From the link:
The overall unemployment rate in Singapore was 2.0% in 2012.
http://www.gov.sg/factually/content/unemployment-in-singapore#sthash.MEJzUv4d.dpuf
Good economic regulations:
Singapore... citizenship applicants must also be "of good character,"...and be able to support themselves and their dependents financially.
http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/rapid-growth-singapores-immigrant-population-brings-policy-challenges
In the US, if you are 'able to support yourself and your dependents financially', you are subject to the Obamacare surcharge and penalties. And you attempt to start an organization with the name 'tea party' in it, expect a personal audit from the revenue agency.
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http://www.tpnn.com/2016/05/10/wyoming-rancher-sticks-feds-wins-big-time-obama-epa/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=PostSideSharingButtons&utm_content=2016-05-11&utm_campaign=websitesharingbuttons
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This is a sad and scary big government story. Good for Daily Caller for not letting this drop. As with all Obama scandals, why was no one arrested, fired, etc.? Why do we not hold those even higher accountable? A right wing, free market President might have been impeached over this, negligently releasing 880,000 pounds of toxic chemicals, a 3 million gallon release, into our rivers and streams polluting 3 states and the Navajo nation.
The EPA wanted complete control of this area by designating it against the will of the locals a Superfund cleanup site,. Now they have won through their own deadly error.
The old saying that you don't fight city hall is so last century. This is more like fighting the Chinese Communist Party backed by People's Liberation Army than it is like fighting your local city hall. Not exactly the EPA that 1970s Republicans envisioned when they created it (and appointed my cousin to be the nation's first director of water quality).
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http://dailycaller.com/2016/06/05/epa-pollutes-river-uses-scare-tactics-to-take-control-of-a-colorado-town/
EPA Pollutes River, Uses Scare Tactics To Take Control Of A Colorado Town
ETHAN BARTON
9:55 PM 06/05/2016
141282
EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy and Gold King Mine. (Reuters) EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy and Gold King Mine. (Reuters)
A decades-long battle between federal environmental officials and a small Colorado town is about to end in the government’s favor, thanks to the agency-caused Gold King Mine spill disaster, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation has found.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) representatives have focused intently on Silverton, Colorado since the mid-1990s, accumulating evidence — and sometimes using scare tactics — to persuade residents to drop their opposition to a Superfund designation for the surrounding region.
Residents surrendered to federal demands only after an EPA work-crew turned the nearby Animas River bright yellow for nearly a week by releasing a three-million-gallon flood of acidic mine waste under extremely questionable circumstances in August 2015.
Suspended in the flood was 880,000 pounds of toxic metals, including lead and arsenic, that poured into the river that supplies drinking water for people living in three states and the Navajo Nation. The mine is just upstream from Silverton.
“After more than two decades working in the region, they still couldn’t get it right,” said Rep. Rob Bishop told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “EPA created a man-made disaster harming numerous states and tribes. The combination of a lack of due diligence and a half-baked plan directly led to the August 5 blowout.”
Bishop, a Utah Republican, condemned EPA for being “incompetent, evasive and deceitful,” adding that “if this wasn’t criminal negligence, it should be.”
The disaster was the last straw that convinced locals to reverse their decades-long opposition and allow the EPA to go forward in designating the region for Superfund listing – a designation the agency reserves only for the nation’s most polluted sites.
Once the designation becomes official, EPA will assume vast new powers throughout the region. But EPA has been encroaching on residents’ lives going back to at least 1994, with more than a few memorable episodes along the way.
In one such instance, EPA officials abruptly announced at a town meeting they needed to test soil for pollution at a local school.
“The Town Board was somewhat blindsided by your request,” San Juan County Commissioners and the Town of Silverton Board of Trustees told EPA in an April 2014 letter. “The County Commissioner [sic] were not even informed that the EPA would be addressing the Town.”
“However, the biggest flaw in the process was bringing the School District into the discussion without talking directly with the School Superintendent,” the local officials said in the letter, which was obtained by the House panel.
“The Superintendent spent the next day on damage control informing the community that an environmental review of the school grounds had been completed and nothing was found that would raise health concerns.”
Town and county officials also questioned the necessity of soil testing because previous samples “didn’t raise any significant red flags” and they were “unaware of any medical studies or individual cases where the soils have had an adverse impact on a child or adult’s health. We have generation after generation after generation that have lived most or all of their lives in Silverton without suffering any health-related issues from their long-term exposure to the mineralized soils.”
The officials claimed that “despite the minimum justification, EPA managed to maximize the fears in parents, as well as raise concerns for property owners.”
Local officials also wondered if EPA representatives who spoke with residents “were really listening to our concerns, if they were listening but they did not understand how critical those concerns are, or did they listen to our concerns but determined that the EPA knows what is better for Silverton and San Juan County than we do.”
Regardless, another letter obtained by TheDCNF, showed that less than a year later, EPA, joined by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and the Colorado Department of Health & Environment, compelled a nearby mine owner to conduct studies normally done only after a Superfund designation is received.
Numerous agencies “all have expended substantial efforts and resources in defining the problems” in the region around Silverton, said the January 2015 letter to Sunnyside Gold Corporation. “Furthermore, the agencies are continuing to commit resources to characterize the extent and magnitude of contamination in other parts of the Upper Animas River Watershed.”
The letter said EPA would use Superfund authority to work at the nearby Red and Bonita Mine. The agency has also used the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERLCA) – the Superfund law – to force other area mine owners to grant EPA officials access to their properties. (RELATED: Gold King Mine Owner Fears EPA’s ‘Limitless Legal Budget’)
How EPA has used Superfund authority against Silverton exemplifies the inability of local residents to resist the federal agency when it is determined to have its way.
The first goal of the Animas River Stakeholders Group that was formed in 1994 to protect the environment from abandoned mines was to “keep CERCLA out.” The EPA not only blocked accomplishment of that goal, it also thwarted local efforts to cleanup the region’s environment.
“It definitely has taken the wind out of our sails,” group official Peter Butler told The Denver Post in May. “It’s uncertain what the Animas River Stakeholder Group’s future will be.”
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If private sector jobs grew at the same rate as regulator jobs under Obama, 3.7 million more people would be working.
(http://www.investors.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/EDIT-boom-052716-768x532.jpg)
http://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/its-boomtime-for-regulators-under-obama-while-economy-flatlines/
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http://www.wsj.com/articles/what-dismantling-dodd-frank-can-do-1479342487
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You can tell the regulation beat has reached critical political mass when even the folks at Politico are pushing it on the home page. “Obama’s agencies push flurry of ‘midnight’ actions,” the political website reported recently, adding that Republicans are preparing to block or repeal as many as of these and previous rules as possible.
This effort is going to be a political brawl—not least due to resistance from the bureaucracies in the executive branch and perhaps even some political appointees who go native quickly. If Donald Trump wants the deregulation effort to succeed—and it’s essential to promoting faster growth—he and Chief of Staff Reince Priebus could take a lesson from the Reagan era and appoint a political SWAT team to direct it from the White House.
The temptation will be to leave it to Congress or the office of regulatory affairs at the White House budget office. But the director of that office might not be confirmed for months, even as appointees in the departments find excuses not to move against Obama rules. Those appointees may want to keep their new political power or they might fear the media backlash, which will often be fierce.
The Reagan White House met this challenge by setting up a special task force to run regulatory policy for the first months of 1981. It was led by then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, with a big assist from his general counsel Boyden Gray. Key staff included such policy legends as Jim Miller, who later ran the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and White House budget office; Frank Blake, who would go on to run Home Depot; Jim Tozzi, who would become the ranking career official in the White House regulatory shop; Tim Muris, who ran the FTC under George W. Bush; and Jeffrey Eisenach, now with the American Enterprise Institute.
It’s not too much to say this task force ran much of the government for six months as the new appointees found their sea legs. In one famous February 1981 incident, the general counsels of agencies were called to the White House to review executive order 12291 on regulation. The counsels began to cross out huge chunks until they got to the end and discovered that Ronald Reagan had already signed it. The task force was so successful that Democrats John Dingell and Al Gore hauled some of them up to Capitol Hill for a public scolding.
Democrats also made the director of regulatory affairs subject to Senate confirmation for the first time, so they could haze nominees about opposing new rules. It’s no accident that Reagan was the only recent President to restrain the regulatory state. Neither Bush Administration had any comparable success, and George W. Bush set new records for pages in the Federal Register until President Obama took the crown.
Mr. Trump might consider putting Mike Pence in charge of a regulatory task force with a few key White House aides dedicated to the task. The team needs someone like the Vice President-elect with enough internal clout to keep the agencies in line and back up more junior aides until the regulatory-affairs director is confirmed and on the job.
Deregulation is one of those subjects that makes eyes glaze over, but if the job is done right it can give the economy a crucial boost.
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second post
By Dan Sullivan
Dec. 4, 2016 4:17 p.m. ET
19 COMMENTS
President-elect Donald Trump has made investing in U.S. infrastructure a priority. This country urgently needs to build and repair roads, bridges, airports, pipelines and rail lines. But a huge roadblock is the federal permitting system. Even with a more business-friendly administration, a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan won’t accomplish much unless Congress reforms the way public-works projects are approved.
America used to be the envy of the world in building great projects responsibly, efficiently and on time. The Pentagon was built in 16 months. The 1,500-mile Alaska-Canadian Highway, which passes through some of the world’s most rugged terrain, took about eight months. Today, infrastructure projects across America often require several years simply to get through the federal government’s pre-build permitting process. Consider a few examples.
New U.S. highway construction projects usually take between nine and 19 years from initial planning and permitting to completion of construction, according to a 2002 Government Accountability Office study. It will have taken 14 years to permit an expansion of Gross Reservoir in Colorado, and it took almost 20 years to permit the Kensington gold mine in Alaska.
It took four years to construct a new runway at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, but it took 15 years to get the permits. Todd Hauptli of the American Association of Airport Executives bitterly joked to the Senate Commerce Committee last year, “It took longer to build that runway than the Great Pyramids of Egypt.”
These problems have been building for decades as the U.S. regulatory state has grown. But the Obama administration has made the situation much worse by politicizing the construction of America’s critical energy infrastructure.
It took Shell seven years and $7 billion to get White House permission to drill a single oil-exploration well off the coast of Alaska. Never mind that the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act requires that resources in those waters “be made available for expeditious and orderly development.” This capricious permitting was part of why Shell halted its operations in Alaska, stranding enormous oil and gas resources and killing thousands of potential jobs.
The Keystone XL pipeline languished in permitting purgatory for almost the entire two terms of the Obama administration before the president finally killed it in 2015. Terry O’Sullivan, president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, called the president’s actions a “cynical manipulation of the approval process.” President Obama also recently halted the Dakota Access pipeline, though in September a federal court determined that the project complied with arduous permitting, legal and consultation requirements.
Mr. Trump is set to reverse the Obama administration’s abysmal permitting record, but Congress also has a responsibility. Last year I introduced the Regulations Endanger Democracy Act, or RED Tape Act, which would cap federal regulations with a simple one-in-one-out rule. When an agency issues a new regulation, it must repeal an old one. (Mr. Trump has suggested removing two for every one that is added.) Even though the idea has been successfully implemented in Canada and the United Kingdom, not a single Senate Democrat voted for it, and the legislation died.
Another bill I wrote would expedite federal permitting to repair or rebuild thousands of crumbling bridges across our country, but it received only three Democratic votes on the Senate floor. Once again my colleagues across the aisle prevented this reform from being implemented.
After Congress convenes in January, I will introduce the Rebuild America Now Act. It would establish strict time limits so that if permits aren’t approved or denied for good cause within a specified time, then the project is deemed approved. The law also creates a one-stop shop for environmental reviews and permitting to ensure that projects don’t get bogged down by agencies pursuing different agendas. Agencies would be required to abide by the RED Tape Act, a version of which would be part of the new law.
Having lost the election, progressives are already preparing litigation and protests to stop American infrastructure and energy projects. My bill would limit sue-and-settle practices that abuse the judicial system, as well as stopping groups that oppose economic development from needlessly delaying or killing much-needed projects. It would also have a builder’s and worker’s bill of rights, which would include timely permitting decisions and transparency in agency decision-making to spell out exactly why a permit is denied.
President Obama’s $800 billion stimulus in 2009 wrecked the country’s balance sheet while doing little to spur economic growth. An infrastructure bill that fails to reform dysfunctional permitting runs a similar risk. These reforms will prevent billions of dollars from getting wasted in red tape and litigation, making it easier to overhaul the nation’s infrastructure.
Mr. Sullivan, a Republican, is a U.S. senator from Alaska.
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Despotism and Donald Trump
Decrying Trump while ignoring the tyranny of the administrative state.
President-elect Donald Trump and Andy Puzder, chief executive of CKE Restaurants, shake hands as Puzdner leaves Trump National Golf Club Bedminster clubhouse in Bedminster, N.J., Saturday, Nov. 19, 2016. ENLARGE
President-elect Donald Trump and Andy Puzder, chief executive of CKE Restaurants, shake hands as Puzdner leaves Trump National Golf Club Bedminster clubhouse in Bedminster, N.J., Saturday, Nov. 19, 2016. Photo: Associated Press
By William McGurn
Dec. 12, 2016 7:36 p.m. ET
244 COMMENTS
Guess it depends on what you mean by “authoritarian.”
During the election, Donald Trump was routinely likened to Hitler. The headlines suggest not much has changed.
From the New Republic: “Donald Trump Is Already Acting Like an Authoritarian.” National Public Radio: “Donald Trump: Strong Leader or Dangerous Authoritarian?” The New York Times: “Beyond Lying: Donald Trump’s Authoritarian Reality.” The New Yorker: “Trump’s Challenge to American Democracy.”
What’s striking here is that the same folks who see in Mr. Trump a Mussolini in waiting are blind to the soft despotism that has already taken root in our government. This is the unelected and increasingly assertive class that populates our federal bureaucracies and substitutes rule by regulation for the rule of law. The result? Over the Obama years, the Competitive Enterprise Institute reckons, Washington has averaged 35 regulations for every law.
In the introduction to its just-released report on how to address this federal overreach, CEI President Kent Lassman puts it this way: “It is time for a reckoning.”
Philip Hamburger is a law professor at Columbia and author of “Is the Administrative State Unlawful?” He believes the president-elect’s cabinet selections thus far—Scott Pruitt for the Environmental Protection Agency, Betsy DeVos for Education, Ben Carson for Housing and Urban Development, Andrew Puzder for Labor—may give Mr. Trump a unique opening not only to reverse bad Obama rules but to reform the whole way these agencies impose them. If Mr. Trump really hopes to drain the swamp, says Mr. Hamburger, cutting these agencies back to constitutional size would be a terrific start.
For one thing, almost all these departments are legacies of some progressive expansion of government. While an uneasy William Howard Taft, for example, made Labor its own cabinet office on the last day of his presidency, Woodrow Wilson named its first secretary.
Meanwhile, HUD is a child of LBJ’s Great Society. The EPA was Nixon’s attempt to buy liberal approval for his administration. As for the Education Department, it was a reward from Jimmy Carter for the endorsement the National Education Association gave him in 1976. At the time this cabinet seat was established, even the New York Times called it “unwise” and editorialized against it.
More Main Street
Let Liberals Be Liberals Dec. 5, 2016
The War That Dare Not Speak Its Name Nov. 28, 2016
Anti-Trumpers Channel Their Inner Donald Nov. 22, 2016
A Clinton-Free Democratic Party Nov. 14, 2016
There’s a good case that Americans would be better off without most of these departments meddling in our lives and livelihoods, however politically unfeasible this might be. The next best news, however, is that Mr. Pruitt, Dr. Carson, Mr. Puzder and Mrs. DeVos are not beholden to the orthodoxies that drive the rules and mandates these bureaucracies impose.
Mrs. DeVos, for example, has spent her life promoting school choice, and her husband founded a charter school. It is difficult to imagine an Education Department under Secretary DeVos ever sending out a “Dear Colleague” letter to bully universities into expanding the definition of sexual harassment and then encouraging them to handle allegations in a way that has turned many campus tribunals into Star Chambers. Not to mention making a federal case about bathrooms.
Ditto for HUD. Under President Obama, HUD bureaucrats, under the banner of “fair housing,” have taken it upon themselves to decide what the right mix of race, income and education is for your town—and will impose fines and punishments for communities that resist. Anyone remember the people’s elected representatives directing HUD to impose its ideas of social engineering on the rest of America?
Or take the EPA. Whether it’s some Ordinary Joe running afoul of wetlands laws or the department’s deliberate attempt to destroy the market for coal, the EPA needs more than good science. It also needs some honest cost-benefit analysis about the prescriptions it pushes.
And then there’s Labor. Under Obama Secretary Tom Perez, the department has so overstepped the authority Congress gave it (for example, on its overtime rule) that federal judges have stepped in to block it, notwithstanding the courts’ traditional deference. As an employer himself, Mr. Puzder appreciates the fundamental reality of labor: which is that you don’t help workers by making them too expensive to hire.
The good news is that Mr. Trump does not have to fight government by regulatory fiat alone. House Speaker Paul Ryan has a raft of legislation that would reassert the authority of the people’s elected representatives over an unaccountable bureaucracy—including a regulatory budget that would limit the costs an agency can impose each year.
Even without legislation, there are things Mr. Trump could do. Mr. Hamburger, for example, dreams of a president ordering federal agencies to submit all their rules to Congress for approval. He further believes the stars are in rare alignment for reform, with Mr. Ryan pushing it in the House, cabinet secretaries who appear sympathetic to the cause and a popular mandate against rule from above.
“Oddly enough, the danger is that Mr. Trump will not think big enough,” says Mr. Hamburger. “To paraphrase him, the impact of changing the way Washington issues rules would be YUGE—and it would make him a historic and transformative president.”
Write to mcgurn@wsj.com.
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In 1961, according to my analysis, John F. Kennedy oversaw 450 political and career executives who occupied 17 bureaucratic layers at the top of government. Mr. Trump will soon oversee more than 3,000 executives in 63 layers. This leads to a Washington hallmark: titles like chief of staff to the deputy assistant secretary. Such complexity distorts information as it travels up the chain of command, and then thwarts guidance on the way down.
Paul Light of New York University
http://www.wsj.com/articles/what-purple-america-wants-from-trump-1481675070
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How the House Will Roll Back Washington’s Rule by Bureaucrat
We passed legislation to tighten the reins on federal agencies and will soon nix new Obama regulations.
Photo: De Agostini/Getty Images
By Kevin McCarthy
Jan. 24, 2017 7:05 p.m. ET
When President Trump delivered his inaugural address last week, he declared that “we are transferring power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the people.” Note that he said we are transferring power, in the present tense. The House has already begun turning the president’s words into reality by targeting the part of Washington that poses the greatest threat to America’s people, economy and Constitution: the federal bureaucracy.
Washington’s many agencies, bureaus and departments propagate rules that weigh down businesses, destroy jobs, and limit American freedoms. Career bureaucrats who never face the voters wield punishing authority with little to no accountability. If there’s a swamp in Washington, this is it.
In President Obama’s final year the Federal Register hit 97,110 pages—longer by nearly 18,000 pages, or 15 King James Bibles, than in 2008. Federal regulations cost the American people about $1.89 trillion every year, according to an estimate by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. That’s more than 10% of GDP, or roughly $15,000 per American household. The Obama administration has also burdened the public with nearly 583 million hours of compliance over the past eight years, according to the American Action Forum. That’s averages to nearly five hours of paperwork for every full-time employee in the country.
Faced with a metastasizing bureaucracy, the House is undertaking structural and specific reform to offer the nation a shot at reviving the economy, restoring the Constitution, and improving government accountability, all at once. The plan to strip power from the bureaucracy and give it back to the people has two steps.
First, we began structural reform by passing the REINS Act, an acronym for Regulations From the Executive in Need of Scrutiny. If the bill becomes law, new regulations that cost $100 million or more will require congressional approval before they take effect. The House also passed the Regulatory Accountability Act, which would require agencies to choose the least-costly option available to accomplish their goals. That bill would also prohibit large rules from going into effect while they are being challenged in court. Further, it would end “ Chevron deference,” a doctrine that stacks the legal system in favor of the bureaucracy by directing judges to defer to an agency’s interpretation of its own rules.
Second, the House next week will begin repealing specific regulations using the Congressional Review Act, which allows a majority in the House and Senate to overturn any rules finalized in the past 60 legislative days.
Perhaps no aspect of America’s economy has been as overregulated as energy. So the House will repeal the Interior Department’s Stream Protection Rule, which could destroy tens of thousands of mining jobs and put up to 64% of the country’s coal reserves off limits, according to the National Mining Association.
Likewise, the Obama administration moved at the 11th hour to limit the oil-and-gas industry through a new methane regulation. It could cost up to $1 billion by 2025, the American Petroleum Institute estimates, even though the industry is already subject to the Clean Air Act and has leveraged technological advances to dramatically reduce methane emissions. The additional regulation would force small and struggling operations—in the West in particular—to close up shop, which is why it will be one of the first to go.
The House will also take the ax to the Securities and Exchange Commission’s disclosure rule for resource extraction, which adds an unreasonable compliance burden on American energy companies that isn’t applied to their foreign competitors. This rule, which closely mimics a regulation already struck down by the courts, would put American businesses at a competitive disadvantage.
The bureaucracy under President Obama has also threatened America’s constitutional rights. A new rule from the Social Security Administration would increase scrutiny on up to 4.2 million disabled Americans if they attempt to purchase firearms. This would elevate the Social Security Administration to the position of an illegitimate arbiter of the Second Amendment. And in an affront to basic due process, the bureaucracy has attempted to blacklist from federal contracts any business accused of violating labor laws—before the company even has a chance to defend itself in court.
With President Trump’s signature, every one of these regulations will be overturned. In the weeks to come, the House and Senate will use the Congressional Review Act to repeal as many job-killing and ill-conceived regulations as possible. That’s how to protect American workers and businesses, defend the Constitution, and turn words into actions.
Mr. McCarthy, a California Republican, is the House majority leader.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/josh-rogin/wp/2017/01/26/the-state-departments-entire-senior-management-team-just-resigned/?utm_term=.f5b77937289b&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1
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On the face of it this is a good thing. They seemed politicized anyway.
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Team Trump has-- surprise!-- a different version from WaPo:
http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2017/01/26/fake-news-media-reports-state-dept-mass-resignation-officials-actually-fired/
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If I remember correctly, the CFPB is funded by the fines it levies?! Not sure how this passes Constitutional muster (i.e. it is beyond Congress's power of the purse) but apparently SCOTUS ruled it does.
===============================================
How We’ll Stop a Rogue Federal Agency
Congress can defund Elizabeth Warren’s unaccountable and unconstitutional CFPB.
President Obama, Elizabeth Warren and Richard Cordray, July 18, 2011.
President Obama, Elizabeth Warren and Richard Cordray, July 18, 2011. Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
By Jeb Hensarling
Feb. 8, 2017 6:43 p.m. ET
97 COMMENTS
The Obama presidency placed no greater burden on America’s growth potential than the avalanche of regulations that smother the U.S. economic system. The most destructive and dangerous of the new regulatory bureaucracies created by the Democrat-dominated 111th Congress is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The CFPB stands with ObamaCare as a crowning “achievement” of Mr. Obama’s transformation of America. With unprecedented automatic funding provided directly by the Federal Reserve, the agency is unanswerable to anyone. Democrats chose to insulate it from Congress, the president, voters and the democratic process. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia noted as much in its recent PHH v. CFPB decision, which ruled the bureau’s governing structure unconstitutional. The court said the unelected CFPB director “enjoys more unilateral authority than any other officer in any of the three branches of government of the U.S. Government, other than the President.”
The CFPB is arguably the most powerful, least accountable agency in U.S. history. CFPB zealots have the power to determine the “fairness” of virtually every financial transaction in America. The agency defines its own powers and can launch investigations without cause, imposing virtually any fine or remedy, devoid of due process. It requires lenders essentially to read their clients’ minds, know and weigh their clients’ comprehension levels, and forecast future risk. It can compel the production of reams of data and employ methodologies that “infer” harm without finding any specific instance of harm or knowing violation.
The regulatory web spun by the CFPB can make every provider of financial services guilty until proven innocent, inviting selective enforcement and financial shakedowns. The CFPB is the embodiment of James Madison’s warning in Federalist No. 47 that “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands . . . may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
This tyranny has harmed the very consumers it purports to help. Since the CFPB’s advent, the number of banks offering free checking has drastically declined, while many bank fees have increased. Mortgage originations and auto loans have become more expensive for many Americans.
No corner of American finance is beyond the CFPB’s grasp, even auto dealers—which are specifically excluded from its jurisdiction by the Dodd-Frank Act. To dodge this legal constraint, the CFPB regulates auto dealers through enforcement “bulletins” on auto lenders, employing statistical analysis rather than specific acts to charge lenders with discriminatory lending. The race of borrowers is inferred based on the borrowers’ names and home addresses. Through this ruse they smear and shake down lenders.
The House in 2015 voted 332-96—with 88 Democrats in support—to force the CFPB to rescind its auto-lending guidance. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the intellectual mother of the CFPB, led Senate Democrats’ opposition to the bipartisan bill. This is a sign the 52-member Senate Republican majority probably will be unable to overcome Democrat filibusters on legislation limiting the CFPB’s powers.
President Trump should immediately fire CFPB Director Richard Cordray, citing the president’s constitutional responsibility to take care that the laws are faithfully executed. A new director could first undo all harmful actions taken by the CFPB during the Obama era. He could then implement policies that actually benefit consumers, such as limits on class-action lawsuits wherein plaintiff law firms get fortunes but injured financial consumers get pennies.
The CFPB could also protect Americans from government abuses. A new director could penalize government bond issuers that fail to disclose unfunded pension liabilities. It could also put an end to government accounting and solvency standards that, if adopted by private companies, would result in fines or a firm’s closure.
Yet even with good policy, the CFPB would still be unconstitutional. For those who reject Sen. Warren’s view that the ends justify the means, the agency must be functionally terminated. Consumer protection can instead come through an accountable and constitutional process.
The Senate can achieve this with a simple majority vote. Dodd-Frank requires the Fed to fund all CFPB budget requests automatically—creating an estimated $6.6 billion funding stream over the next 10 years. Under a budget process known as reconciliation, the House Financial Services Committee, which I chair, and the Senate Banking Committee could be mandated to save $6.6 billion over 10 years of the budget. In the ensuing reconciliation bill the two committees could then direct the Fed to terminate CFPB funding. Senate Democrats could not filibuster the bill.
Congress could then transfer the CFPB’s consumer protection role to the Federal Trade Commission or back to traditional banking regulators, where it resided before the CFPB’s creation. A Senate point of order requiring 60 votes could be brought against these provisions, on the ground that they don’t belong in a reconciliation bill. The advantage of putting the restructuring language in the reconciliation bill is that if Democrats use the point of order to strike the language, they—not Republicans—would have elected to end all CFPB funding, leaving the new system of consumer financial protection to be decided in future legislation.
When Democrats sought to take consumer protection outside the democratic process, consumers were harmed by a reduction in competition. With fewer lenders serving fewer borrowers, fewer businesses employed fewer workers. A healthy economy is the first casualty of any war on credit, and a loan denied becomes a job lost. The CFPB has eroded freedom, trampled due process and killed jobs. It must go.
Mr. Hensarling, a Texas Republican, is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.
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Using this thread to chronicle bureaucratic resistance:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/state-department-dissent-believed-largest-ever-formally-lodged-1485908373?mod=social_content_eng
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second post of the day:
OF COURSE IT DOES: Gravy Train Flows Wide And Deep At Elizabeth Warren’s Consumer Agency.
The Senate majority and minority leaders are paid $193,000 annually. Two hundred and one CFPB employees outdo Sens. Mitch McConnell and Charles Schumer in pay.
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan of Wisconsin receives $223,000 per year, but that’s less than what 54 CFPB employees are paid.
Another 170 CFPB employees earn more than the secretaries of defense and state, the attorney general and the director of national intelligence. All cabinet salaries are capped at $199,700, but not at the bureau. Thirty-nine CFPB employees earn more than the $230,000 paid to Vice President Mike Pence.
A total of 198 CFPB employees also earn more than their ultimate boss, Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellin, who is paid $201,700.
Overall, 449 CFPB employees get at least $100,000 per year and 228 CFPB are paid more than $200,000, according to publicly available 2016 data.
These findings are part of a Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group salary analysis for the consumer agency that was founded by Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and then-President Barack Obama in 2011. The agency was created under the Dodd-Frank Act to serve as a consumer agency protecting the poor against financial fraud.
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If I have it right, Trump is in the process of reversing the regs under Dodd-Franks that protect not-so-bright consumers from the predations of short term loan operations. John Oliver did a segment on this that impressed me, so it looks like I am about to be unhappy with this development-- which plays right into the Dem playbook I might add.
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If I have it right, Trump is in the process of reversing the regs under Dodd-Franks that protect not-so-bright consumers from the predations of short term loan operations. John Oliver did a segment on this that impressed me, so it looks like I am about to be unhappy with this development-- which plays right into the Dem playbook I might add.
Ah, we can't live without the nanny state, can we?
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https://www.wired.com/2017/02/trumps-gifts-wall-street-threaten-retirees-robots/
Robot financial advisors working in the best interests of clients?
But who is running the robots
CD writes:
"John Oliver did a segment on this that impressed me, so it looks like I am about to be unhappy with this development-- which plays right into the Dem playbook I might add."
It sure sounds like we will have our first trillion dollar market cap companies. And our first 100 billion net worth individuals during Trump. Will this work for the pions like me? We will see.
Many middle class people are not getting a dime in tax savings .
And we still have the what 40 something % who pay none.
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GM: See if you can find the John Oliver show on this, then tell me what you think.
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If I have it right, Trump is in the process of reversing the regs under Dodd-Franks that protect not-so-bright consumers from the predations of short term loan operations. John Oliver did a segment on this that impressed me, so it looks like I am about to be unhappy with this development-- which plays right into the Dem playbook I might add.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4U2eDJnwz_s
Was this it?
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Thank you, will watch it later today.
In the meantime, is this a fight we need to undertake now?
Retirement Advice in the Trump Era
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD NYT
FEB. 11, 2017
A federal judge in Texas did President Trump a favor last week. It came in a decision in a case filed by the financial industry against the Labor Department to overturn an Obama-era regulation called the “fiduciary rule,” which requires financial advisers to put their clients’ interests first when giving advice and selling investments for retirement accounts.
The judge, Barbara Lynn, called the plaintiffs’ objections “without merit,” “unpersuasive” and “at odds with market realities.”
If Mr. Trump were smart, he’d see the judge’s decision as a warning that he chose an ill-advised course on Feb. 3, when he sided with Wall Street, and against savers and retirees, by calling for a review and possible rollback of the rule, which is slated to take effect in April. As Judge Lynn’s decision makes clear, the rule is solid, and those behind the rollback effort, which was spearheaded by Gary Cohn, Mr. Trump’s top economic adviser and, until recently, president of Goldman Sachs, would have a difficult time asserting otherwise.
Photo
Gary Cohn at Trump Tower in January. Credit Kevin Hagen for The New York Times
The only rationale for a rollback would be to entrench a status quo in which retirement savers forfeit an estimated $17 billion each year to stockbrokers, insurance agents and other advisers who steer them into high-cost strategies and products when comparable lower-cost options are available.
The fiduciary rule, developed by the Obama Labor Department over years of painstaking analysis and open debate, is a common-sense safeguard with far-reaching consequences. By requiring that advice be prudent and transparent about fees and conflicts of interest, it helps to ensure that the billions of dollars currently siphoned off in overly expensive investments would instead remain with savers and retirees.
The financial industry has argued that the Labor Department has no authority to impose a fiduciary duty on retirement advisers. Citing federal pension law, the courts have found otherwise and have even indicated that the government waited too long to assert its authority. Judge Lynn quoted approvingly from Labor Department research that justified the need for a fiduciary rule by noting that the explosion of 401(k)’s and I.R.A.s in recent decades had shifted decision making responsibility onto individuals, but without updating the regulation of advisers. That mismatch has created a confusing system, in which some advisers adhere to a fiduciary standard and many others don’t, while clients generally assume they are getting advice when they are really getting sales pitches.
Industry foes of the fiduciary rule have also argued that the rule will limit consumer choice. That is true insofar as it will remove conflicted, self-serving advice from the menu of options presented to clients. But that is not a flaw in the rule; it is the rule’s purpose. The courts have found that in crafting the fiduciary rule, regulators reasonably weighed the harm to savers from biased advice against the harm to advisers from the obligation to deliver impartial advice. The result, they said, is a rule that deserves to stand.
The court’s findings will greatly complicate any review of the rule by the Trump administration, because regulators would have to rebut findings that have already withstood legal challenge. And not just any legal challenge. Financial industry groups bent over backward to ensure that their case would be heard in Texas, where courts are seen to be industry-friendly. But even there they lost. That’s because they were wrong, on all counts.
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GM:
Maybe this was it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxUAntt1z2c
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Nope, this was it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDylgzybWAw
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Nope, this was it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDylgzybWAw
Yes, we need a nanny state to be sure we always make the right decision.
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Feds control 2/3 of Utah? Wow !:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/444864/antiquities-act-outdated-progressive-law-bears-ears-national-monument
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"Nope, this was it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDylgzybWAw"
"Yes, we need a nanny state to be sure we always make the right decision."
Is that really responsive?
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"Nope, this was it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDylgzybWAw"
"Yes, we need a nanny state to be sure we always make the right decision."
Is that really responsive?
Are payday loans a bad idea? No doubt. Should government use it's power to interfere in a business transaction between adults? Casinos are a bad idea. Las Vegas is a city built on bad math and poor impulse control. Should gaming be allowed?
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I get all that.
OTOH there is something about sophisticated loan shark operators fukking those teetering on the edge , , ,
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I get all that.
OTOH there is something about sophisticated loan shark operators fukking those teetering on the edge , , ,
There are all sorts of bad financial choices made by the underclass, out of wedlock births are much more profoundly negative. Should the power of the state perform shotgun marriages?
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I get all that.
OTOH there is something about sophisticated loan shark operators fukking those teetering on the edge , , ,
Let's say there should be a legal limit on the financial rape of those desperate with bad credit, what should the law be?
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How about starting with super simple disclosure of the annualized rate?
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http://www.dickmorris.com/trump-demand-fiduciary-duty-retirement-counseling-lunch-alert/?utm_source=dmreports&utm_medium=dmreports&utm_campaign=dmreports
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How about starting with super simple disclosure of the annualized rate?
Agreed. Disclose the interest rate in font as big as your name, on the front page . I would be surprised to learn there isn't already a requirement, pre-feuxcahontas, for basic consumer loan disclosure as there is with mortgages.
Makes sense that to charge and collect interest you need to provide a reasonably clear contract.
And how about the other side of this? People with bad credit are doing what? Taking products and services from people and stores without paying by the agreed terms. Repo is the car dealers fault?? Taken as a group, this is RICO level organized crime and Bernie Madoff level fraud. Does anybody care about that?
As a landlord might say to a normal person, have YOU ever made someone go to court to get you out of a place you aren't paying for? Have you ever moved out of a place and left all the doors and windows broken? Have you had eight or 10 car purchases in a row end in repo? If this kind of thing isn't illegal, maybe it ought to be. Why does government protection have to be one-sided?
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"As a landlord might say to a normal person, have YOU ever made someone go to court to get you out of a place you aren't paying for? Have you ever moved out of a place and left all the doors and windows broken? Have you had eight or 10 car purchases in a row end in repo? If this kind of thing isn't illegal, maybe it ought to be. Why does government protection have to be one-sided?"
A fair point!
That said, isn't this sort of thing revealed in the credit check you run on prospective tenants? Or filtered out in great part by requiring first and last month, etc.?
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A fair point!
That said, isn't this sort of thing revealed in the credit check you run on prospective tenants? Or filtered out in great part by requiring first and last month, etc.?
The Tesla dealership and the salesman of new construction in Palo Alto can weed out the riff raff but a good part of America has to deal with the people as they come in.
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http://thefederalistpapers.org/us/irs-refuses-plea-to-take-fraud-recommendation?utm_source=FBLC&utm_medium=FB&utm_campaign=LC
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https://pjmedia.com/trending/2017/04/02/the-va-secretary-himself-is-now-calling-for-va-accountability/
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A New Slogan for Trump: ‘You’re Hired’
Leaving jobs vacant only empowers career bureaucrats, without saving much money.
Signing an executive order in the White House, March 13.
Signing an executive order in the White House, March 13. Photo: nicholas kamm/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
By Karl Rove
April 12, 2017 6:35 p.m. ET
11 COMMENTS
President Donald Trump bragged on Fox News in February that it was a good thing he was leaving vacant “hundreds and hundreds of jobs” in the government. “A lot of those jobs, I don’t want to appoint,” the president said, “because they’re unnecessary to have.”
The problem is the federal government had roughly 2,633,000 civilian employees in 2014, according to the Office of Personnel Management. There are so many federal workers that the OPM is still calculating the official number for the past two years. No president can run a government that vast with tweets and executive orders.
Mr. Trump needs allies in key positions if he wants to bend the bureaucracy in the direction of his policies. A president can fill about 4,000 posts in the federal bureaucracy, roughly a quarter of which require Senate approval. Leaving hundreds of offices vacant would save only negligible amounts on salaries, and it would squander billions on unneeded government programs.
–– ADVERTISEMENT ––
He needs his people in every nook and cranny to bring about change. Without their leadership, career civil servants will default to inaction. Even at the departments where careerists might be inclined to support Mr. Trump’s agenda—Commerce, Defense, Homeland Security and Treasury—they won’t move without specific direction from under, assistant and deputy secretaries.
The president’s agenda will face even tougher sledding if he leaves openings in hostile bureaucracies like the Environmental Protection Agency and Labor and Education departments. He needs to put his 4,000 appointees in place to lead the other 2.6 million federal workers in implementing his vision.
These appointees can help identify waste, fraud, abuse and ineffective programs in the bureaucracies where they work. They are critical to getting their departments’ regulatory functions executed properly. They are vital to selling Mr. Trump’s legislative initiatives to Congress and the public.
Leaving vacancies invites potentially embarrassing problems. If something goes wrong, the bureaucracy could blame the absence of leadership, leaving President Trump to take the heat. Cabinet secretaries could become overwhelmed trying to manage their massive departments with only a handful of personal aides. That leads to mistakes, burnout and unnecessary turnover.
It takes time for a new administration to get organized, and even more to get agencies going in the right direction. But this White House has been staffing the government at a snail’s pace. To make his term the most successful it can be, Mr. Trump should make filling key jobs a priority, built into his daily duties.
The White House chief of staff should triage the empty billets and identify the ones to fill immediately. To expedite the process, he should call regular personnel meetings with the major West Wing players. If they don’t show up for a meeting, they forfeit the right to comment on that day’s slots. Otherwise the appointments will be mired by internecine warfare.
The president should mark regular time on his schedule to discuss personnel and conduct interviews for high-profile positions. The president’s itinerary is already packed, but adding these tasks would send a clear message about their importance. These meetings can be canceled if necessary, but having something on his calendar tends to force action.
The president should also think about outsourcing part of some personnel decisions. He’s been reluctant to do that, and aides have reportedly spiked candidates who criticized him during the campaign. But outsourcing went extremely well with his Supreme Court pick. Perhaps he should grant his cabinet secretaries leeway to recommend several qualified possibilities for certain posts, leaving the president to decide if they’re acceptable.
Mr. Trump developed a company worth billions with a small cadre of longtime aides and family members, which is impressive. But negotiating branding agreements, purchasing buildings, developing hotels, building golf courses—even hosting a reality television show—is not comparable to the pressure and pace of overseeing the U.S. government.
The president sits atop a government with a $4 trillion budget, leading a country with an $18.6 trillion economy and 324 million people. Surely Mr. Trump can find 4,000 qualified stalwarts among them to help him before his first year in office ends. The fate of his presidency may depend upon it.
Mr. Rove helped organize the political-action committee American Crossroads and is the author of “The Triumph of William McKinley ” (Simon & Schuster, 2015).
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second post
April 12, 2017 7:07 p.m. ET
WSJ
Now we know one reason Democrats blocked President Trump’s first nominee to be secretary of Labor: The bureaucracy is in open rebellion against the new President’s directives. The casus belli is the fiduciary rule, the attempt by Obama Labor Secretary Tom Perez to rewrite the rules for offering investment advice. The rule was supposed to go into effect Monday.
Proponents argued that the new rule would raise the standards for advice given to retirement investors. In reality, it would make that advice more expensive while opening up another lucrative vein for the plaintiffs bar. In anticipation of the rule, some financial firms have already announced they are dropping their business for these small investors. (MARC: IIRC the idea is that the advisors would need to have fiduciary obligations to the advised? Is this a bad thing?)
That’s one reason President Trump last month directed the Labor Department to review the rule. Specifically, the President asked Labor to investigate whether the rule is likely to reduce access to retirement-savings vehicles or related financial advice, whether the rule has caused disruptions in the industry that may harm retirees and investors, and whether it will lead to more lawsuits. If a review determines any of these things had happened, the department is to propose revising or abolishing the rule.
So what was the Labor response? Last week the holdovers from the Obama Administration announced that “the Department has concluded it would be inappropriate to broadly delay application of the fiduciary definition and Impartial Conduct Standards.”
Translation: We don’t care what an elected President says.
The Perez loyalists know that Mr. Trump’s second nominee, Alex Acosta, hasn’t been confirmed and will take time to settle in once he is. The review of the fiduciary rule won’t be completed for months, and the rule is being challenged in court. By refusing to delay implementation of the rule in its entirety, the bureaucracy hopes to entrench its main features so it will be too late or too costly or too difficult to do anything about it, even if a review ultimately concludes it was a mistake.
The slow pace of Trump nominations has encouraged this kind of rebellion across the executive branch, as Obama holdover Sally Yates showed when she still ran the Justice Department. Mr. Trump’s deregulation project is one of the keys to faster economic growth, and he needs his people on the job as fast as possible.
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(MARC: IIRC the idea is that the advisers would need to have fiduciary obligations to the advised? Is this a bad thing?)
There are two sides to that argument. Whether or not it is a good thing is one question, but whether or not this is MAJOR federal government legislation that ought to be argued and decided through the legislative branch for executive signature, constitutional process rather central planning politburo, is another thing.
Fiduciary responsibility sounds good but what it changes is the nature of who can sue whom for what. Let's say you are a middle income earner and among a range of investments available at the start of the year 2000 your investment adviser leads a little too heavily into the best performing sector of the last 3 years, like some nice tech stocks like Lucent, Cisco, Nortel and JDSU, and the market collapses as it did. When the world's greatest R&D company stock went from 160 to 2 as you owned it, maybe you don't lose money because you can sue your adviser who should have known with such obvious hindsight that this was in a position to fall heavily, he or she should have known that, and it was far too great a risk to be offered to this client. And the jury agreed.
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The $600 Billion Man
A new report highlights one cost of the Obama legacy.
By James Freeman
May 31, 2017 1:21 p.m. ET
As if taxes haven’t been high enough, the U.S. Government also forced Americans to spend an eye-watering $1.9 trillion in 2016 just to comply with federal regulations. That’s according to the latest annual “10,000 Commandments” report released today by Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “If it were a country, U.S. regulation would be the world’s seventh-largest economy, ranking behind India and ahead of Italy,” notes Mr. Crews. He adds that our regulatory tab is nearly as large as the total pretax profits of corporations.
Mr. Crews has become one of the most hated men in Washington by tabulating the hidden costs—those not counted in the roughly $4 trillion of direct federal spending—that politicians and bureaucrats impose on the American economy. And nobody imposed more than Barack Obama. According to the Crews annual scorecards, the yearly cost of federal regulation soared by more than $700 billion in nominal dollars from 2008, the last full year of the Bush Administration, through Mr. Obama’s final full year of 2016. Adjusting for inflation, you can call Mr. Obama the $600 Billion Man.
One measure of the amount of red tape spewing out of Washington is the number of pages of proposed and final rules printed in the Federal Register. “Of the top 10 all-time-high Federal Register page counts, seven occurred under President Barack Obama,” notes Mr. Crews. And let’s hope that Mr. Obama’s latest record, set on his final lap in 2016, will never be broken. Mr. Crews reports that the register “finished 2016 at 95,894 pages, the highest level in its history and 19 percent higher than the previous year’s 80,260 pages.”
Some readers will argue that the $600 billion figure wildly understates the costs inflicted on the U.S. economy by Mr. Obama given increases in on-the-books federal spending and the creation of future federal spending commitments. But on that score he must share the blame. It’s not easy to precisely assign responsibility between the executive branch and the Congress for each dollar of the historic increase in federal outlays that occurred early in the Obama presidency or the relative moderation that occurred after Republicans took control of the House in 2010.
In contrast, the executive branch is largely responsible for the costs of regulation. Yes, a Democratic Congress had to agree with Mr. Obama to enact laws like Dodd-Frank and ObamaCare that created new burdens, but the regulatory agencies have enjoyed broad discretion in deciding just how heavy those burdens will be and upon whom they will fall. And much of the Obama increase, especially in the area of environmental regulation, was due to new Obama interpretations of existing laws, not new legislation.
So our 44th president owns the additional $600 billion annual regulatory burden that he’s placed on American shoulders. This is real money, and to put it in context this column looked at the most recent Consumer Expenditure Survey from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Based on these data, the hidden Obama tax is more than twice what American consumers spend each year on gasoline and motor oil ($249 billion) and more than three times what we spend on electricity ($186 billion). It’s more than we spend on food while dining in ($529 billion) or dining out ($400 billion). It’s also roughly nine times the $66 billion that American consumers spend on alcoholic beverages, and your humble correspondent suspects there may be a connection here.
This column also suspects that the staggering burden of government rules has a lot to do with the historically slow growth of the Obama era and the expectation that President Trump will announce his intention to exit the Paris climate agreement this week.
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-tyranny-of-the-administrative-state-1497037492?shareToken=st6e599c7aada249d8869a02fc43029cdb
The Tyranny of the Administrative State
Government by unelected experts isn’t all that different from the ‘royal prerogative’ of 17th-century England, argues constitutional scholar Philip Hamburger.
By John Tierney
June 9, 2017 3:44 p.m. ET
New York
What’s the greatest threat to liberty in America? Liberals rail at Donald Trump’s executive orders on immigration and his hostility toward the press, while conservatives vow to reverse Barack Obama’s regulatory assault on religion, education and business. Philip Hamburger says both sides are thinking too small.
Like the blind men in the fable who try to describe an elephant by feeling different parts of its body, they’re not perceiving the whole problem: the enormous rogue beast known as the administrative state.
Sometimes called the regulatory state or the deep state, it is a government within the government, run by the president and the dozens of federal agencies that assume powers once claimed only by kings. In place of royal decrees, they issue rules and send out “guidance” letters like the one from an Education Department official in 2011 that stripped college students of due process when accused of sexual misconduct.
Unelected bureaucrats not only write their own laws, they also interpret these laws and enforce them in their own courts with their own judges. All this is in blatant violation of the Constitution, says Mr. Hamburger, 60, a constitutional scholar and winner of the Manhattan Institute’s Hayek Prize last year for his scholarly 2014 book, “Is Administrative Law Unlawful?” (Spoiler alert: Yes.)
“Essentially, much of the Bill of Rights has been gutted,” he says, sitting in his office at Columbia Law School. “The government can choose to proceed against you in a trial in court with constitutional processes, or it can use an administrative proceeding where you don’t have the right to be heard by a real judge or a jury and you don’t have the full due process of law. Our fundamental procedural freedoms, which once were guarantees, have become mere options.”
In volume and complexity, the edicts from federal agencies exceed the laws passed by Congress by orders of magnitude. “The administrative state has become the government’s predominant mode of contact with citizens,” Mr. Hamburger says. “Ultimately this is not about the politics of left or right. Unlawful government power should worry everybody.”
ILLUSTRATION: KEN FALLIN
Defenders of agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Environmental Protection Agency often describe them as the only practical way to regulate today’s complex world. The Founding Fathers, they argue, could not have imagined the challenges that face a large and technologically advanced society, so Congress and the judiciary have wisely delegated their duties by giving new powers to experts in executive-branch agencies.
Mr. Hamburger doesn’t buy it. In his view, not only is such delegation unconstitutional, it’s nothing new. The founders, far from being naive about the need for expert guidance, limited executive powers precisely because of the abuses of 17th-century kings like James I.
James, who reigned in England from 1603 through 1625, claimed that divinely granted “absolute power” authorized him to suspend laws enacted by Parliament or dispense with them for any favored person. Mr. Hamburger likens this royal “dispensing” power to modern agency “waivers,” like the ones from the Obama administration exempting McDonald’s and other corporations from complying with provisions of the Affordable Care Act.
James also made his own laws, bypassing Parliament and the courts by issuing proclamations and using his “royal prerogative” to establish commissions and tribunals. He exploited the infamous Star Chamber, a court that got its name from the gilded stars on its ceiling.
“The Hollywood version of the Star Chamber is a torture chamber where the walls were speckled with blood,” Mr. Hamburger says. “But torture was a very minor part of its business. It was very bureaucratic. Like modern administrative agencies, it commissioned expert reports, issued decrees and enforced them. It had regulations controlling the press, and it issued rules for urban development, environmental matters and various industries.”
James’s claims were rebuffed by England’s chief justice, Edward Coke, who in 1610 declared that the king “by his proclamation cannot create any offense which was not an offense before.” The king eventually dismissed Coke, and expansive royal powers continued to be exercised by James and his successor, Charles I. The angry backlash ultimately prompted Parliament to abolish the Star Chamber and helped provoke a civil war that ended with the beheading of Charles in 1649.
A subsequent king, James II, took the throne in 1685 and tried to reassert the prerogative power. But he was dethroned in the Glorious Revolution in 1688, which was followed by Parliament’s adoption of a bill of rights limiting the monarch and reasserting the primacy of Parliament and the courts. That history inspired the American Constitution’s limits on the executive branch, which James Madison explained as a protection against “the danger to liberty from the overgrown and all-grasping prerogative of an hereditary magistrate.”
“The framers of the Constitution were very clear about this,” Mr. Hamburger says, rummaging in a drawer for a pocket edition. He opens to the first page, featuring the Preamble and Article 1, which begins: “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress.”
“That first word is crucial,” he says. “The very first substantive word of the Constitution is ‘all.’ That makes it an exclusive vesting of the legislative powers in an elected legislature. Congress cannot delegate the legislative powers to an agency, just as judges cannot delegate their power to an agency.”
Those restrictions on executive power have been disappearing since the late 19th century, starting with the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887. Centralized power appealed to big business—railroads found commissioners easier to manipulate than legislators—as well as to American intellectuals who’d studied public policy at German universities. Unlike Britain, Germany had rejected constitutional restraints in favor of a Prussian model that gave administrative agencies the prerogative powers of the king.
Mr. Hamburger believes it’s no coincidence that the growth of America’s administrative state coincided with the addition to the electorate of Catholic immigrants, blacks and other minorities. WASP progressives like Woodrow Wilson considered these groups an obstacle to reform.
“The bulk of mankind is rigidly unphilosophical, and nowadays the bulk of mankind votes,” Wilson complained, noting in particular the difficulty of winning over the minds “of Irishmen, of Germans, of Negroes.” His solution was to push his agenda using federal agencies staffed by experts of his own caste—what Mr. Hamburger calls the “knowledge class.” Wilson was the only president ever to hold a doctorate.
“There’s been something of a bait and switch,” Mr. Hamburger says. “We talk about the importance of expanding voting rights, but behind the scenes there’s been a transfer of power from voters to members of the knowledge class. A large part of the knowledge class, Republicans as well as Democrats, went out of their way to make the administrative state work.”
Mr. Hamburger was born into the knowledge class. He grew up in a book-filled house near New Haven, Conn. His father was a Yale law professor and his mother a researcher in economics and intellectual history. During his father’s sabbaticals in London, Philip acquired a passion for 17th-century English history and spent long hours studying manuscripts at the British Museum. That’s where he learned about the royal prerogative.
He went to Princeton and then Yale Law School, where he avoided courses on administrative law, which struck him as “tedious beyond belief.” He became slightly more interested during a stint as a corporate lawyer specializing in taxes—he could see the sweeping powers wielded by the Internal Revenue Service—but the topic didn’t engage him until midway through his academic career.
While at the University of Chicago, he heard of a colleague’s inability to publish a research paper because the study had not been approved ahead of time by a federally mandated institutional review board. That sounded like an unconstitutional suppression of free speech, and it reminded Mr. Hamburger of those manuscripts at the British Museum.
Why the return of the royal prerogative? “The answer rests ultimately on human nature,” Mr. Hamburger writes in “The Administrative Threat,” a new short book aimed at a general readership. “Ever tempted to exert more power with less effort, rulers are rarely content to govern merely through the law.”
Instead, presidents govern by interpreting statutes in ways lawmakers never imagined. Barack Obama openly boasted of his intention to bypass Congress: “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone.” Unable to persuade a Congress controlled by his own party to regulate carbon dioxide, Mr. Obama did it himself in 2009 by having the EPA declare it a pollutant covered by a decades-old law. (In 2007 the Supreme Court had affirmed the EPA’s authority to do so.)
Similarly, the Title IX legislation passed in 1972 was intended mainly to protect women in higher education from employment discrimination. Under Mr. Obama, Education Department bureaucrats used it to issue orders about bathrooms for transgender students at public schools and to mandate campus tribunals to adjudicate sexual misconduct—including “verbal misconduct,” or speech—that are in many ways less fair to the accused than the Star Chamber.
At this point, the idea of restraining the executive branch may seem quixotic, but Mr. Hamburger says there are practical ways to do so. One would be to make government officials financially accountable for their excesses, as they were in the 18th and 19th centuries, when they could be sued individually for damages. Today they’re protected thanks to “qualified immunity,” a doctrine Mr. Hamburger thinks should be narrowed.
“One does have to worry about frivolous lawsuits against government officers who have to make quick decisions in the field, like police officers,” he says. “But someone sitting behind a desk at the EPA or the SEC has plenty of time to consult lawyers before acting. There’s no reason to give them qualified immunity. They’ll be more careful not to exceed their constitutional authority if they have to weigh the risk of losing their own money.”
Another way of restraining agencies—one President Trump could adopt on his own—would be to require them to submit new rules to Congress for approval instead of imposing them by fiat. The president could also order at least some agencies to resolve disputes in regular courts instead of using administrative judges, who are departmental employees. Meanwhile, Congress could reclaim its legislative power by going through regulations, agency by agency, and deciding which ones to enact into law.
Mr. Hamburger’s chief hope for reform lies in the courts, which in earlier eras rebuffed the executive branch’s power grabs. Those rulings so frustrated both Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt that they threatened retaliation—such as FDR’s plan to pack the Supreme Court by expanding its size. Eventually judges surrendered and validated sweeping executive powers. Mr. Hamburger calls it “one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the federal judiciary.”
The Supreme Court capitulated further in decisions like Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council (1984), which requires judges to defer to any “reasonable interpretation” of an ambiguous statute by a federal agency. “Chevron deference should be called Chevron bias,” Mr. Hamburger says. “It requires judges to abandon due process and independent judgment. The courts have corrupted their processes by saying that when the government is a party in case, they will be systematically biased—they will favor the more powerful party.”
Mr. Hamburger sees a good chance that the high court will limit and eventually abandon the Chevron doctrine, and he expects other litigation giving the judiciary a chance to reassert its powers and protect constitutional rights. “Slowly, step by step, we can persuade judges to recognize the risks of what they’ve done so far and to grapple with this very dangerous type of power,” he says. The judiciary, like academia, has many liberals who have been sympathetic to the growth of executive power, but their perspective may be changing.
“Administrative power is like off-road driving,” Mr. Hamburger continues. “It’s exhilarating to operate off-road when you’re in the driver’s seat, but it’s a little unnerving for everyone else.”
He says he observed this effect during a recent conversation with a prominent legal scholar. The colleague, a longtime defender of administrative law, was discussing the topic shortly after Mr. Trump’s inauguration.
The colleague told Mr. Hamburger: “I am beginning to see the merit of your ideas.”
Mr. Tierney is a contributing editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
Appeared in the June 10, 2017, print edition.
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"From time to time, I have been importing (purchasing online) rye bread from Finland, since I love its sour taste. This time when I ordered bread, prior to the bread being shipped from Finland, FedEx said FDA wants my email, which I gave to them. Soon after I received the bread.and ate most of it. Now weeks later, I get a letter from FDA saying that they are investigating the case (import of 6 pcs of bread) and there could be penalties. The bread cost about 10 Euro, shipping was about 30 $ and now I am being threatened with fines. If they had concerns, why did they not stop me early in the process ?, the bread is not home made, its made by a large commercial company which ships worldwide and to the USA for years. I truly wish Trump will put a stop to these 3 letter organizations. Obviously they have too much time on their hands."
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"From time to time, I have been importing (purchasing online) rye bread from Finland, since I love its sour taste. This time when I ordered bread, prior to the bread being shipped from Finland, FedEx said FDA wants my email, which I gave to them. Soon after I received the bread.and ate most of it. Now weeks later, I get a letter from FDA saying that they are investigating the case (import of 6 pcs of bread) and there could be penalties. The bread cost about 10 Euro, shipping was about 30 $ and now I am being threatened with fines. If they had concerns, why did they not stop me early in the process ?, the bread is not home made, its made by a large commercial company which ships worldwide and to the USA for years. I truly wish Trump will put a stop to these 3 letter organizations. Obviously they have too much time on their hands."
http://www.cei.org/pdf/5985.pdf
Obviously, we need MOAR government!
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http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/monthly-federal-spending-tops-400b-first-time
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“Outlays for the Departments of Education and Housing and Urban Development increased by $33 billion and $21 billion respectively, because of upward revisions to the estimated net subsidy costs of loans and loan guarantees issued in prior years,” said CBO.
CBO also noted the impact of July beginning on a Saturday.
“Because July 1 fell on a weekend this year, certain payments scheduled for that date were instead made in June,” said CBO. “If not for that shift, the deficit in June 2017 would have been about $44 billion lower.”
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$21.8 Mil in DHS Conferences Exposed after Trump Kills Rule Forcing Fed Agencies to Report Conference Spending
JULY 26, 2017
Weeks after the Trump administration abolished a rule requiring federal agencies to report conference spending, a breakdown of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) multi-million-dollar conference tab illustrates the need to keep the measure in place. The mammoth agency created after 9/11 to prevent another terrorist attack fails miserably to protect the southern border, to bust dangerous visa overstays, and to remove criminal illegal aliens — but it knows how to throw a party for employees and “stakeholders.” It also knows how to hide a chunk of the tab from taxpayers and the Trump administration is facilitating the process, laughably enough, asserting that agencies have tight internal controls.
That clearly isn’t the case, even under the reporting rules that were recently nixed by the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB). DHS held 911 conferences totaling $21.8 million during a recent two-year period, according to a federal audit released this month by the agency’s Inspector General. In fiscal year 2014 DHS spent $11.4 million on 433 conferences and $10.4 million on 478 conferences in 2015. At the time, federal agencies were required to report all conferences that cost more than $100,000 each, but DHS kept two out of every three that cost north of $100,000 secret. The agency watchdog doesn’t provide the exact number, but reveals in its report that the total of unreported conferences was a whopping $3.5 million for the two years examined by investigators. In fiscal year 2014 the unreported conferences totaled $862,881 and in fiscal year 2015 they came to $2,822,561.
DHS committed a number of other violations during this period, the audit states. “The Department also did not always report all hosted conferences greater than $20,000 to OIG within 15 days after the end of the conference,” the report says. “In addition, the Department did not always enter actual conference cost data into the Conference Approval Tool timely or accurately, and in some instances DHS did not have appropriate documentation to support expenses.” For instance, the report reveals that expenses totaling $79,471 cannot be accounted for because the agency was unable to provide appropriate documentation. “Without adequate documentation, DHS cannot be assured that all conference spending is appropriate or in the best interest of the Government and taxpayers,” the report states.
Outrageous conference spending has been a systemic problem in government for a long time, which is why the Obama administration implemented rules to crack down on the waste. Apparently, the measures weren’t very effective but eliminating them doesn’t seem like a solution either. There’s no telling the abuses that a massive agency like DHS, with more than 240,000 employees and an annual budget of $40.6 billion, will commit without proper oversight. DHS has a well-established reputation for its outlandish conference spending. A few years ago, the agency blew an eye-popping $20.3 million in just one year to host 1,883 conferences under supposedly stricter spending rules. This included a dozen events that each exceeded $100,000, including $196,308 for a San Francisco forum aimed at preventing terrorism as well as “securing and managing our borders” and an additional $130,941 for a separate San Francisco shindig so 39 senior agency officials could engage with “key influencers and decision makers” in the cybersecurity industry.
Other examples listed in the federal audit include $179,053 on the International Oil Spill Conference in Savannah, Georgia, which focused on environmental impacts of oil spills and $125,348 on a Washington D.C. event aimed at “maximizing the benefits of gender diversity.” The idea behind that conference was to promote gender equity through a group known as Women in Federal Law Enforcement (WIFLE), a nonprofit created by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the U.S. Treasury to address why women remain underrepresented in federal law enforcement. A $110,993 “outreach” summit in Washington D.C. brought Customs and Border Patrol senior managers, transportation executives and foreign government partners together to discuss “securing and managing our borders” and a $108,617 Ft. Worth Texas conference provided a “platform for conveying information regarding relevant issues in immigration enforcement.” DHS also doled out $131,868 on the Afghanistan Pakistan Illicit Procurement Network Symposium in Tampa, Florida where discussions focused on preventing hostile nations and illicit procurement networks from illegally obtaining U.S. military products or sensitive technology that could be used against the U.S.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/450331/tillerson-state-department-reform-special-forces-veterans-foreign-service?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202017-08-10&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
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https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/justice-department-says-trump-can-appoint-head-consumer-watchdog-n823956
A lawyer friend comments:
"It’s interesting how eager the Dems (including the nasty Warren and Cordray) are for this to go before the courts. That has the potential to tee up whether the entity itself was set up constitutionally or not. Given Trump’s desire to eliminate it entirely, and to return its functions to normal entities, I’m not sure they’ll like the result. My money is on the court ruling for Trump."
I never understood how this Agency passed muster with its budget being beyond the reach of Congress!
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http://carolineglick.com/the-state-department-drops-the-ball/
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1st known mention of "climate Change" in the US bureaucracy:
"The implications for the world food situation and for US interests would be considerably greater if climatologists who believe a cooling trend is underway prove to be right."
- US Dept of State, August 1974
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve14p1/d144
It's been all downhill since then.
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-big-beautiful-trump-2018-issue-1514499989?shareToken=st4eb1c14a7cc245b9a57fac952057be9d&reflink=article_email_share
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At Ben Carson's HUD it is business as usual:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455292/ben-carson-secretary-housing-urban-development-unimpressive-start
cry
I wonder if he is too kind hearted to ruffle feathers
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At Ben Carson's HUD it is business as usual:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455292/ben-carson-secretary-housing-urban-development-unimpressive-start
cry
I wonder if he is too kind hearted to ruffle feathers
On the optimistic side of it, maybe he is waiting his turn to take bold action - with the healthcare attempt and tax reform partial success ahead of him. Also, maybe this article will help to light a fire under him.
These 'listening tours' may not be all bad. He strikes me as a guy who likes to know a subject thoroughly before claiming to know the answers.
If his tenure at HUD comes and goes quietly with no real change or reform it will be a HUGE disappointment.
The greatest thing we can do to improve housing in America and lessen the need for public housing and government involvement in housing in the first place is to increase private sector wages and the workforce participation rate, improvements well under way IMHO.
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As I understand it, the inner logic of HUD is inherently progressive-- what is the point of Dr. Ben going there?
IMHO Trump would have been better off putting Dr. Ben to use in developing a replacement for Obamacare-- I remember being impressed with his articulations during the campaign.
Instead, he now gets trotted out for the first time on MLK Day , , ,
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"the inner logic of HUD is inherently progressive"
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I agree. As you say, government intervention in housing is inherently progressive. The only way they could do better would be to do less.
There are two challenges with affordable housing, the cost of housing - which government makes worse, and take home incomes - which government makes worse.
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https://theintercept.com/2018/01/10/puerto-rico-electricity-prepa-hurricane-maria/
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http://thehill.com/policy/finance/371603-dc-circuit-consumer-bureaus-structure-is-constiutional?rnd=1517414045/?userid=188403
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http://thehill.com/regulation/371878-trumps-targeting-of-federal-workforce-puts-unions-on-edge?rnd=1517569236
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http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article199431784.html
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President Trump Must Move at the Speed of Technology, Not Bureaucracy
Originally published at Fox News.
Changing the direction of the Washington system from liberal to conservative was the key to President Trump’s remarkably successful first year. Changing the speed of government from the routine, slow, change-avoiding pace of bureaucracy to the high tempo, innovative, constantly accelerating pace of technology will be the key to success in the next three years.
The Trump-led directional shift is unquestionable. He appointed and placed a conservative justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, seated a record number of appellate court judges in his first year, and achieved an all-time record for repealing regulations. At the National Space Council meeting on Wednesday, Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Director Neomi Rao said the Trump Administration has cut 22 regulations for each one it created.
Trump also worked with Republicans to deliver a dramatically pro-growth tax cut, which generated immediate proof of its power through the reaction of the business community. Again and again, President Trump has moved the Washington system away from a liberal direction toward a more conservative direction.
Now comes the real test – changing the deeply entrenched traditional system of bureaucratic processes and procedures into one that is entrepreneurial, dynamic, adaptive, and flexible.
Think of this as moving from the speed of bureaucracy to the speed of technology.
The two systems are mutually exclusive.
The current vast system of government is inherently bureaucratic, change-resistant, and closed to new ideas. Entrenched bureaucracies get used to what they are doing and the routine habits and rhythms at which they operate. They are process rather than product-oriented. They are activity rather than achievement-oriented. They measure inputs (although never enough) and reject the concept of measuring outputs. They regard metrics as arbitrary measures that prove they are busy, rather than benchmarks that demonstrate their progress.
Bureaucracies also have an enormous capacity to absorb and retrain political appointees. Every Trump political appointee should watch a season of the British television series “Yes Minister” or its sequel “Yes Prime Minister.” After watching just a few episodes of this sitcom, in which senior British civil servants surround their civilian leaders with misleading information and false assumptions, Trump’s political appointees will better understand how their ability to enact real change is being limited by those who make avoiding change their number one priority.
The only way to dramatically change bureaucracies is to change the outcomes expected from them. You will never win an internal fight over the processes bureaucrats are using or the traditions they are following. The bureaucrats will simply slow walk you with more and more arguments and information.
The key is to instead figure out the positive, measurable outcomes you want and insist on the bureaucrats changing their system until it can produce to your expectations.
One of the key change principles is to insist that government learn to move at the speed of technology instead of the speed of bureaucracy. The iPhone 4 has roughly the same computing power as the Cray-2, which was the fastest supercomputer in the world in 1985. And, of course, the iPhone 4 is now obsolete.
Apple has gone from almost bankrupt to the highest-valued company in the world.
The development of the drone as both a commercial and military vehicle has been amazing.
The rise of Amazon from a bold idea to the largest retailer in the world has been astounding.
The breakthroughs in health science and technology are amazing and new discoveries are being made every day. Breakthroughs in health care bureaucracies (public and private, including the health guilds), in contrast, have been astonishingly slow.
The rise of SpaceX’s reusable rockets has received a lot of well-deserved attention. The company’s recent Falcon Heavy launch with its Tesla and “Starman” payload may mark a turning point in space exploration and development.
While NASA and the old, slow-moving big companies have been following a long, expensive process, both Musk and Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos have been developing radically new proposals that will lower the cost of going into space by an enormous amount.
Keeping up with the speed of technology means both NASA and the Department of Defense must rethink their current investment in traditional, expensive, single-use rocket systems – from the ground up.
The same rate of development is about to hit education. Pioneers such as Sebastian Thrun at Udacity, Mitch Daniels at Purdue University, Dr. Jerry Davis at the College of the Ozarks, and Brandon Busteed at Gallup are developing remarkable insights into dramatically improving education.
In health information technology, new startups focused on helping doctors with a doctor-friendly health information system may break through the giant vendor-hospital-centered model which has crippled the growth of health information for patients and doctors.
Again and again, we see innovators and entrepreneurs starting at the fringes with small, streamlined operations and profound insights into how technology is evolving.
If the Trump team can learn to move at the speed of technology and to take advantage of the astonishing wave of entrepreneurship, which the new tax bill will be encouraging, then the amount of progress in the next few years will be amazing.
Your Friend,
Newt
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If anything goes wrong, the "I told you so" backlash will be formidable.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/business/offshore-drilling-trump-administration.html?emc=edit_ta_20180310&nl=top-stories&nlid=49641193&ref=cta
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https://pjmedia.com/trending/obama-kennedy-amnesty-zealot-handling-dhs-data-illegal-immigration/?utm_source=PJMCoffeeBreak&utm_medium=email&utm_term=March2018
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the rule of lenity and the contra proferentem doctrine
https://fedsoc.org/commentary/publications/towards-an-administrative-rule-of-lenity-restoring-the-constitutional-congress-by-reforming-statutory-interpretation
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http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/387719-pompeo-lifts-hiring-freeze-at-state-department?userid=188403
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http://thehill.com/policy/finance/388636-trump-signs-repeal-of-auto-loan-policy-targeting-racial-bias?rnd=1526925396?userid=188403
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http://www.dickmorris.com/kill-irs-employees-union-lunch-alert/?utm_source=dmreports&utm_medium=dmreports&utm_campaign=dmreports
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https://www.popsci.com/epa-pfas-water-contamination?CMPID=ene060218#page-2
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Administrative Law Smackdown
The Supreme Court strikes a blow for political accountability.
The Supreme Court is seen in Washington, D.C.
The Supreme Court is seen in Washington, D.C. Photo: Evan Golub/Zuma Press
By The Editorial Board
June 21, 2018 7:11 p.m. ET
52 COMMENTS
Thursday wasn’t a complete loss for liberty at the Supreme Court. While the Justices opened Pandora’s box in taxing the internet (see nearby), they also took a modest step toward enforcing more accountability on the ever-expanding administrative state.
In Lucia v. SEC, the Court ruled 6-3 that under the Constitution administrative law judges must be appointed by proper political authorities, not merely by career bureaucrats. ALJs, as they’re known, have proliferated across the government to adjudicate disputes between citizens and federal bureaucracies. ALJs aren’t Article III judges confirmed by the Senate. They are executive-branch (Article II) judges who rule on executive-branch cases.
U.N. Rights Council Withdrawal; Japan's Guest Workers
Securities and Exchange Commission administrative Judge Cameron Elliot ruled against Raymond Lucia for securities violations. Yet Judge Cameron wasn’t appointed by the President or the five SEC Commissioners. In a crisp majority opinion, Justice Elena Kagan concludes that this violates the Constitution’s Appointments Clause because Judge Elliot is an officer wielding considerable authority.
As Justice Clarence Thomas writes in his concurring opinion, “the Appointments Clause maintains clear lines of accountability—encouraging good appointments and giving the public someone to blame for bad ones.” The government cannot hand authority to ALJs who are appointed by low-level managers with no line of responsibility to the President. They must be appointed by the President or SEC Commissioners in this case, or a head of department in others.
The left-leaning Justice Kagan’s decision to join the five conservative judges in this view of the separation of powers is encouraging and shows a streak of intellectual independence. Justice Stephen Breyer agreed that Judge Elliot had been wrongly appointed on statutory grounds, but he saw no need for Justice Kagan’s more sweeping constitutional analysis.
The ruling is a victory for political accountability in an administrative state that is ever more sprawling and opaque. Administrative judges can be especially frustrating because their rulings overwhelmingly favor the agencies for which they work. Agencies with the power for significant enforcement action like the SEC should be using them in fewer cases, and the Commissioners should review their decisions with more care than they do.
One reason Americans hate government is that they too often feel it is rigged against them. Kudos to the Justices for trying to maintain clearer constitutional lines of political accountability.
Appeared in the June 22, 2018, print edition.
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http://www.aei.org/publication/justice-kavanaugh-and-the-administrative-state/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTnpVeU16WTNOVGczTkRNNCIsInQiOiJydFpGeFV5NCt0U3E4UGFaRnNvYVgzWUY3NWdVK3FJZU02ekFqVXMwQWlrN203U3R6OVhuMnkxSFkzU05FU1JqWk14YlBHMlQrTWxHWFJ5VGxicU15OGNrUjF2ZkVkdUZFYU5zaGRyVGJnM2srTFluUlRkbEVIYUVpYXd0XC95OTYifQ%3D%3D
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https://www.prageru.com/videos/who-are-most-powerful-people-america
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Glenn Reynolds column from July 2016. This idea is brilliant.
If our rulers think global warming is a crisis, let them be a good example for the rest of us.
Everyone talks about global warming, but nobody does anything about it. At least, the people who talk about saving the planet the most seem to have the biggest carbon footprint. But I have some ideas for fixing that.
In this, I’m inspired by Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Tex., who noticed something peculiar recently. It seems that EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, who spends a lot of time telling Americans that they need to drive less, fly less, and in general reduce their consumption of fossil fuels, also flies home to see her family in Boston "almost every weekend"; the head of the Clean Air Division, Janet McCabe, does the same, but she heads to Indianapolis. In air mileage alone, the Daily Caller News Foundation estimates that McCarthy surpasses the carbon footprint of an ordinary American. Smith has introduced a bill that wouldn't target the EPA honchos’ personal travel, though: It provides, simply, that “None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to pay the cost of any officer or employee of the Environmental Protection Agency for official travel by airplane.”
This makes sense to me. We’re constantly told by the administration that “climate change” is a bigger threat than terrorism. And as even President Obama has noted, there’s a great power in setting an example: “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK.”
Likewise, it’s hard to expect Americans to accept changes to their own lifestyles when the very people who are telling them that it’s a crisis aren’t acting like it’s a crisis. So I have a few suggestions to help bring home the importance of reduced carbon footprints at home and abroad:
Extend Smith’s bill to cover the entire federal government. We have Skype now, and Facetime. There’s no reason to fly to meetings. I’d let the President keep Air Force One for official travel, but subject to a requirement that absolutely no campaign activity or fundraisers take place on any trips in which the president travels officially.
Obama makes a great point about setting the thermostat at 72 degrees. We should ban air conditioning in federal buildings. We won two world wars without air conditioning our federal employees. Nothing in their performance over the last 50 or 60 years suggests that A/C has improved things. Besides, The Washington Post informs us that A/C is sexist, and that Europeans think it’s stupid.
In fact, we should probably ban air conditioning in the entire District of Columbia, to ensure that members of Congress, etc. won’t congregate in lobbyists’ air-conditioned offices.
Speaking of which, members of Congress shouldn’t be allowed to fly home on the weekends. Not only does this produce halfhearted attention to their jobs — the so-called “Tuesday to Thursday Club” — but, again, it produces too much of a carbon footprint. Even if they pay for the travel out of campaign funds, instead of their own budgets, they need to set an example for the rest of us — and for those skeptical foreigners that Obama mentioned.
But, you know, it’s not just the government. We’ve been told that global warming will cause rising sea levels that will inundate coastal cities and produce devastation. I think we need to get ahead of that problem by encouraging people to move away from the coasts before things get bad. We can do that by a steadily-increasing tax on coastal property that will discourage people from moving to, or staying in, coastal cities. Sure, this will hurt property values in Boston or New York, but we all have to do our share.
And speaking of air travel and carbon footprints, it hasn’t escaped my notice how often the biggest advocates for reducing people’s carbon footprints have the biggest footprints themselves. Leonardo DiCaprio, for example, recently brought 500 guests from Los Angeles to St. Tropez to hear him give a speech about . . . climate change. (He also flew by private jet between Los Angeles and New York six times in six weeks recently, as revealed in the WikiLeaks hack of Sony emails.)
Well, we don’t want to regulate with a heavy hand, but we should put a $5-per-gallon carbon tax on jet fuel burned in private jets, perhaps rising to $10 over a few years, to discourage this sort of thing. And we should also deny corporations the ability to deduct private jet flights as a business expense.
These are actually modest proposals, considering the huge importance of saving the planet. After all, if the Pentagon is ordering commanders to take climate change into account in its war plans, surely the non-military missions should feel the pinch, too. And if our ruling classes show themselves willing to make this sort of sacrifice, ordinary Americans might be willing to do the same. Heck, I might even turn my thermostat up to 73.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor
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https://www.dailysignal.com/2019/03/28/clean-water/?utm_source=TDS_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Top5&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTkRKaU4yWmxPREExTkRrMSIsInQiOiJ2cHRwZ2FJMG5SbFVscytUZEVCSjEwNGlPamZGNmg2c0FQYWFpbklMZ0RRTnJpR3ZsNGxHNmxQcDhvR1NqNFlKTnFjaGdhNkRDSkU3Y3Z0YnR2V0xXcm15Zko0aDhyM29ybU9sbER6QjdKejNISDloc0E5bHRsaGw3MWlWbGNRWm56R3NhQU9sT2hrNm1iT0tkM0xpMDMxUEZURVwveW5YbVZmMVhGd2JXcDdRPSJ9
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https://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/press-releases/judicial-watch-supreme-court-moves-to-overturn-conviction-of-veteran-fined-and-jailed-for-digging-ponds-on-his-rural-montana-property/?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=press%20release
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https://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2019/05/obama-program-to-help-struggling-homeowners-blows-millions-on-parties-cars-booze-luxury-travel/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=corruption_chronicles
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I confess to be very uneasy about the move here AND the failure to defend it. FWIW here is a defense:
https://www.dailysignal.com/2019/08/13/3-ways-trumps-new-regulations-will-better-protect-endangered-species/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=3-ways-trumps-new-regulations-will-better-protect-endangered-species&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWW1NeU16UTFaVGhsWXpnNSIsInQiOiJSVmttclRcL3FWT2RUMDVaOUFsTGorY2ZUTWlYKzIxbmRMVmg3QjQrejgyd1pJMkhUUklyRXJ2b3ZvQlBKS3lnN0hzQ0hkc0VQaEkyREdlOGdQeGxVWjdvYnkrM25RQjI2dWRUTldMTXB0dndKSlVOYVdGc1Erc0Z1WnM1a2wrN3oifQ%3D%3D
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https://patriotpost.us/articles/66025-make-government-transparency-great-again-2019-10-10?mailing_id=4581&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4581&utm_campaign=digest&utm_content=body
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Maybe the bureaucrats need to understand they are not appointed for life like Supreme Court Justices
In this case she serves at the behest of the Department of State under the Executive branch .
So who does she think she is?
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Whistleblowers and the Real Deep State
Civil servants too often forget they work for the people and seek to impose their own policy agendas.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
Oct. 11, 2019 6:23 pm ET
Illustration: David Gothard
House Democrats are plowing ahead with an impeachment effort inspired by accusations from an anonymous “whistleblower.” The lawmakers may allow the witness to testify anonymously, sources who themselves remained anonymous told the Washington Post this week. It’s as if the whole effort is designed to confirm President Trump’s complaint that the “deep state” is determined to sabotage his presidency.
By “deep state,” Mr. Trump seems to mean any current or former federal employee who works to undermine him. I find that definition too broad, and it misses an important distinction. Officials like James Comey and John Brennan, respectively former directors of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency, were appointed by politicians and are subject to some public scrutiny and political accountability.
The “deep state”—if we are to use the term—is better defined as consisting of career civil servants, who have growing power in the administrative state but work in the shadows. As government grows, so do the challenges of supervising a bureaucracy swelling in both size and power. Emboldened by employment rules that make it all but impossible to fire career employees, this internal civil “resistance” has proved willing to take ever more outrageous actions against the president and his policies, using the tools of both traditional and social media.
Government-employed resisters received a call to action within weeks of the new administration. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates became acting attorney general on Mr. Trump’s inauguration and Loretta Lynch’s resignation. A week later, the president signed an executive order restricting travel from seven Middle Eastern and African countries. Ms. Yates instructed Justice Department lawyers not to defend the order in court on the grounds that she was not convinced it was “consistent” with the department’s “responsibilities” or even “lawful.” She decreed: “For as long as I am Acting Attorney General, the Department of Justice will not present arguments in defense of the Executive Order.”
Mr. Trump fired her that day, but he shouldn’t have had to. Her obligation was to defend the executive order, or to resign if she felt she couldn’t. Nobody elected Sally Yates.
The Yates memo was the first official act of the internal resistance—not only a precedent but a rallying cry. Subordinates fawningly praised her in emails obtained by Judicial Watch. “You are my new hero,” wrote one federal prosecutor. Another department colleague emailed: “Thank you AG Yates. I’ve been in civil/appellate for 30 years and have never seen an administration with such contempt for democratic values and the rule of law.” Andrew Weissmann—a career department lawyer, then head of the Criminal Fraud Division and later on the staff of special counsel Robert Mueller—wrote: “I am so proud. And in awe. Thank you so much.” Ms. Yates set an example to rebels throughout the government: If she can defy the president, why can’t I?
That mentality fed the stream of leaks that has flowed ever since. The office of Sen. Ron Johnson, chairman of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, made a study of Mr. Trump’s first 18 weeks in office. It found the administration had “faced 125 leaked stories—one leak a day—containing information that is potentially damaging to national security under the standards laid out in a 2009 Executive Order signed by President Barack Obama. ” Nearly 80% focused on the Russia probe, and many revealed “closely-held information such as intelligence community intercepts, FBI interviews and intelligence, grand jury subpoenas, and even the workings of a secret surveillance court.” Unauthorized disclosure of classified information is a felony.
Employees also started using social media to “resist.” A National Parks Service employee had already used an official Twitter account to troll Mr. Trump, passing along a post that showed side-by-side comparison of the crowd at Mr. Trump’s inauguration and the larger one at Mr. Obama’s. Around the time of the Yates firing, someone in the Pentagon set up the Twitter account @Rogue_DOD, on which was posted a damaging opinion piece about Trump and internal documents about climate change. A former employee at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention set up @viralCDC, with the description: “The unofficial ‘Resistance’ page of the CDC.” Its pinned tweet read: “If they choose to make facts controversial, the purveyors of facts must step into the controversy. #ScienceMarch #resist.”
These details come from a Jan. 31, 2017, Washington Post story, which reported that “180 federal employees have signed up for a workshop next weekend, where experts will offer advice on workers’ rights and how they can express civil disobedience.” The report added that some federal employees were in “regular consultation with recently departed Obama-era political appointees” about how to oppose the administration, while others were planning to “slow” their work if asked to focus on anything other than their policy “mission” as they understood it.
At the State Department, resisters organized a “cable” protesting Mr. Trump’s travel ban. It worked its way through dozens of U.S. embassies and ultimately had at least 1,000 signatures. The cable was part of a “dissent channel” that Foggy Bottom maintains to allow officials to disagree with policy, and it is meant to be confidential. The resisters made the letter public, bragging about the numbers of signers and anonymously slamming Mr. Trump. The Wall Street Journal quoted an unnamed State Department official: “There is overwhelming disgust and shock at this executive order.”
A former Obama assistant secretary of state, Tom Malinowski, acknowledged sarcastically that such a protest was unprecedented. “Is it unusual?” he said to the Post. “There’s nothing unusual about the entire national security bureaucracy of the United States feeling like their commander in chief is a threat to U.S. national security. That happens all the time. It’s totally usual. Nothing to worry about.” (Mr. Malinowski is now a congressman from New Jersey.)
Many Obama holdovers have openly worked to cause mayhem in the new administration. Consider Walter Shaub, whom Mr. Obama appointed in 2013 to run the Office of Government Ethics. That office isn’t a watchdog. It doesn’t adjudicate, investigate or prosecute ethics violations or complaints. It was set up in 1978 to help the White House; its webpage notes it is there to “advise” and to “assist” the executive branch in navigating complex ethical questions.
Mr. Trump came to office with more such questions than most, and the Office of Government Ethics should have been a valuable resource. Instead, within weeks of the election, Mr. Shaub was mimicking the president-elect from an official Twitter account: “@realDonaldTrump OGE is delighted that you’ve decided to divest your businesses. Right decision!” “@realDonaldTrump Brilliant! Divestiture is good for you, very good for America!” When Mr. Trump released his plan for his assets, Mr. Shaub blasted it at a public event with press in attendance.
At one point Mr. Shaub sent one of his critical missives to hundreds of government ethics officials, every inspector general, and the chairmen and ranking members of numerous congressional committees. When administration officials began to call him out on his behavior, he loudly resigned and immediately landed a job at the liberal Campaign Legal Center.
Bureaucrats also began filing official internal complaints, demanding to get to define their own policies and programs. In July 2017, an Interior Department employee named Joel Clement published a Washington Post op-ed titled “I’m a Scientist. I’m Blowing the Whistle on the Trump Administration.” He began his piece: “I am not a member of the deep state.”
He explained that he had just filed a complaint with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, a federal body that regulates and protects civil servants. For seven years Mr. Clement had worked at Interior, helping “endangered communities in Alaska prepare for and adapt to a changing climate.” Now he, along with more than two dozen other senior career Interior employees, had been reassigned to working in fossil fuels. He claimed this reassignment was retaliation “for speaking out publicly about the danger that climate change poses to Alaska Native communities.” He called himself a “whistleblower.” At least he put his name on the article.
Although the law protects civil servants from being fired, departments have broad authority to reassign them. Setting policy priorities wasn’t Mr. Clement’s job. Yet his complaint inspired eight Senate Democrats to demand an Interior inspector general investigation. Notably, that 2018 report did not find evidence of Mr. Clement’s charges of retaliation. As then-Deputy Interior Secretary David Bernhardt noted, the department’s actions were entirely “lawful.” Mr. Clement in the fall of 2017 resigned with a much-publicized letter to then-Secretary Ryan Zinke: “Your agenda profoundly undermines the DOI mission and betrays the American people.” Mr. Clement is now a senior fellow at the left-wing Union of Concerned Scientists.
In December 2017, such acts of defiance led the Atlantic to celebrate the “Year of the Civil Servant.” The article hailed the bureaucracy for toiling through “the president’s chaotic first year in office.” It saluted those who had fought against an administration that had made it “nearly impossible” for them to “do their jobs.”
But the job of civil servants is to implement, not undermine, the policies established by elected officials. A government paycheck doesn’t entitle them to call the shots. The bureaucratic resistance has used its power to delay and undermine Trump proposals, leak government information, gin up controversies to run Trump cabinet heads out of Washington—and now provide an excuse for impeachment. Many call themselves whistleblowers, but that’s a bastardization of an honorable word. Whistleblowers expose government fraud; resisters sabotage policy and attempt to undermine an elected government’s legitimacy.
Government workers are a vital part of society. Yet voters have become deeply suspicious—and rightly so—of the federal bureaucracy. That’s damaging the country. Democrats insist they must remove Mr. Trump from office to save America’s institutions and restore its norms. Who’s doing the real damage to institutions and norms? The resistance should look in the mirror.
Ms. Strassel is the Journal’s Potomac Watch columnist. This article is adapted from her book, “Resistance (at All Costs): How Trump Haters Are Breaking America,” to be published Oct. 15.
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https://freebeacon.com/politics/federal-government-workers-donating-overwhelmingly-democrats/
https://federalnewsnetwork.com/mike-causey-federal-report/2017/04/are-feds-democrats-or-republicans-follow-the-money-trail/
the number of Fed DC employees who vote Dem vs Rep is unclear
depending on where I read
but it is hard to believe many favor Trump.
I don't think I recall reading anywhere of bureaucrats undermining POTUS at every turn.
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/10/16/bureaucratic-bullies-trump-administration-successful-war-against-column/3974449002/?fbclid=IwAR1ZK65c7nK_qeqlUFs-oRfqctYMizVBODff8ZcrmfyIOro0tLQSZZBEzgQ
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https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/466494-supreme-court-agrees-to-hear-challenge-to-consumer-bureaus-authority
VERY glad to hear this. If I have it right, the agency has its own independent source of funding and as such is out of the control of the executive AND legislative branches.
Forked Tongue Warren was very pivotal in setting up this agency.
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Mover wealthy Federal employees to economic depressed areas to help lift the economy of those areas and give employees more exposure the rest of America outside the DC beltway:
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/hawley-to-introduce-bill-moving-federal-agencies-out-of-washington-d-c-to-economically-stagnant-areas/
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https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/stephen-miller-pushback-permanent-bureaucracy-a-mortal-threat-to-america
Stephen Miller pushback: ‘Permanent bureaucracy a mortal threat to America’
by Paul Bedard
| October 22, 2019 07:04 PM
Anonymous efforts by anti-Trump federal bureaucrats to thwart the White House agenda through leaks and complaints to friendly reporters and congressional allies are a “mortal threat” to democracy and the 2016 election results, according to a top administration official.
“This is a mortal threat to the American system of government,” said Stephen Miller, the senior adviser for policy.
In 2016, President Trump ran against Washington’s “deep state” and “permanent bureaucracy,” said Miller, and they remain so angry that they are lying, leaking, and attacking the administration’s agenda.
The latest example is the planned book written by an anonymous inside critic and that follows efforts by bureaucrats to thwart Trump policies with leaks to liberal media and Democrats on Capitol Hill.
In an interview, Miller called inside attacks a “very grave threat,” and he explained it this way:
“It is best understood as career federal employees that believe they are under no obligation to honor, respect, or abide by the results of a democratic election. Their view is, ‘If I agree with what voters choose, then I’ll do what they choose. If I disagree with what voters choose, then I won’t, and I’ll continue doing my own thing. So basically it’s heads I win, tails you lose.
“‘If you elect Hillary Clinton, then I’ll implement all of her policies very faithfully, and if I see massive evidence of corruption on Hillary Clinton’s part, then I’ll keep it all a secret. If you elect a candidate I disagree with, then I’ll lie, I’ll leak, I’ll cheat, I’ll smear, I’ll attack, I’ll persecute, and I will refuse to implement, and I will obstruct at every single step of the way.’”
But, said Miller, Trump’s most loyal nonfamily staffer who also worked on the 2016 election, said that the president isn’t “cowed” by the attacks. In fact, he said the criticisms steel the president.
“We’ve made clear that your leaks will backfire and your sabotage will fail, and we’ll simply implement the policy doubly,” he said. “Not only will you not change the outcome, but the more that you try to leak and disrupt, the more determined the president will be in his course to accomplish that which he was sent here to do,” said Miller.
The top aide, interviewed in his second-floor West Wing office, also mocked insider critics who have been responsible for failed policies, especially in the intelligence, foreign policy, and defense arenas.
“The same people who made wrong judgment calls in Iraq, with respect to strategy in Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt, too ... the people who made all these decisions now are so utterly convinced that they alone know what the right policy is,” Miller said.
He portrayed the president as devoted to delivering his campaign promises no matter what is thrown at him.
“Never has someone occupied the Oval Office who is more undeterred and undaunted in executing the task that he was brought here and has pledged to execute,” he said.
Miller added, “A lot of us thought, if you go back many years before Donald Trump ever declared for president, we might never live to see the day when somebody would have the audacity to promise to fundamentally change a broken status quo then get to Washington and proceed to execute on every single thing that he promised to do no matter what was thrown his way. It is truly a miracle to behold.”
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Move the Bureaucrats Out of the Beltway
It no longer makes sense to cluster federal agencies and their employees in Washington, D.C.
By Terry Wanzek
Nov. 29, 2019 4:32 pm ET
A researcher at the Bay Farm Research Facility in Columbia, Miss., July 19, 2018. PHOTO: ALEX FLYNN/BLOOMBERG NEWS
“You know, farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field,” said President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956. That pretty much describes the Agriculture Department bureaucracy in Washington, D.C. Although the big building on Independence Avenue is full of smart and well-meaning people, there’s no getting around the fact that they’re far removed from the regular business of farming.
It doesn’t have to be that way—at least not according to a couple of Republican senators, Josh Hawley of Missouri and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee. They’ve proposed moving the Agriculture Department and nine other federal agencies outside D.C. and into the heart of America.
It’s a thought-provoking idea reminiscent of what agronomist Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, said on his deathbed: “Take it to the farmer.” What he meant was, if we seek excellence in food security, everyone in the food business must collaborate with the men and women who work the land. That’s what Borlaug did as a scientist. He developed new crop strains, boosting food production so much in the 1950s and 1960s that he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.
Today, “taking it to the farmer” involves not just the scientists who innovate but also the Beltway regulators whose rules and mandates affect what happens to those who work the land a thousand miles—or more—away. The Hawley-Blackburn bill calls for moving Agriculture and its more than 100,000 employees to Missouri. Other departments would go elsewhere: Commerce to Pennsylvania, Education to Tennessee, Energy to Kentucky, Health and Human Services to Indiana, Housing and Urban Development to Ohio, Interior to New Mexico, Labor to West Virginia, Transportation to Michigan, and Veterans Affairs to South Carolina.
They wouldn’t relocate to just anywhere within these states, but rather to economically depressed regions. The bill’s sponsors pitch their legislation as an employment program. They call it the HIRE Act, which stands for “Helping Infrastructure Restore the Economy.”
That’s fine, but the main benefit would come from putting regulators into proximity with the people whose lives and businesses they regulate. It makes sense for Agriculture to have its headquarters in a big farm state such as Missouri, and it also makes sense to move Interior to New Mexico, where it will be closer to the Western lands that occupy so much of its time.
Under this plan, federal regulators would gain firsthand knowledge of what the policies they adopt and enforce do to real people. In the future, maybe an official at Agriculture will actually be able to live on a farm. A bureaucrat at Interior will be married to a rancher, and a deputy assistant secretary at Transportation will have a brother who works on an automotive assembly line.
This would be a government “of the people”—something that is lacking as the administrative state inexorably grows in Washington, D.C.
Before the advent of air travel and telecommunications, it made sense to cluster federal agencies in Washington. In the 21st century, however, technology enables us to do so much more—and to take advantage of a truly federal system, which seeks to disperse the power of government.
The Trump administration appears to understand the principle: The headquarters of the Bureau of Land Management soon will move to Grand Junction, Colo., and 547 employees of the Agriculture Department’s Economic Research Service and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture will shift to Kansas City, Mo.
The Hawley-Blackburn bill could attract bipartisan support. Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang also has proposed moving agencies out of Washington. Several liberal-leaning think tanks and journalists have expressed support for the concept.
“The proper role of government” is “that of partner with the farmer—never his master,” said President Eisenhower. Let’s seize a chance to take it to the farmer, as well as everybody else who has a stake in the decisions that we ought to make closer to the people.
Mr. Wanzek grows wheat, corn, soybeans and pinto beans on a family farm in Jamestown, N.D. He represents the 29th district in the state Senate and is a member of the Global Farmer Network.
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NOT a fan of this one!
https://nypost.com/2017/12/19/trump-administration-scraps-organic-food-regulations/
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NOT a fan of this one!
https://nypost.com/2017/12/19/trump-administration-scraps-organic-food-regulations/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_IoNQHMFLk
Organic food is BS.
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The choice is for us to make, not industry.
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The choice is for us to make, not industry.
Government shouldn't be involved in the organic food scams.
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OTOH government should be involved in honest labelling.
With the standard openly defined, the choice is up to me.
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OTOH government should be involved in honest labelling.
With the standard openly defined, the choice is up to me.
What defines "organic food"?
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What defines "organic food"?
[/quote]
Seems to me: grown without man made chemicals,. No roundup. Manure instead of chemical fertilizer? No insecticides, weed killers? No hormones, steroids etc?
This rule change had to do with adding some sort of free range to that to be called organic. It should be a different designation. It should be a free choice. The more efficient choice should not be eliminated, banned, but that of course is next, like fracking.
Government has some role in the labeling, in my view, even though they can't even get that right. It is a fraud on the consumer if they say organic and grow with chemicals, whether there is any health benefit or not, that should be a choice.
Shouldn't it really be private industry group definitions, like UL or CE?
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A Campaign Against Bureaucratic Bloat in U.S. Foreign Policy
Trump’s national security adviser has a plan of attack for a problem decades in the making.
By John Lehman
Feb. 17, 2020 4:19 pm ET
The press has been focused recently on Lt. Col Alexander Vindman’s departure from the National Security Council. But less noticed is the substantive overhaul of the council’s staffing practices, announced last fall by national security adviser Robert O’Brien. President Trump’s renovation of the White House’s top advisory body could help streamline American security for years to come.
The problems that plague the NSC trace to before its founding in 1947. The White House has long sought to centralize decision-making to overcome the political jockeying that often takes place within the national-security establishment. I have lived half of my professional life in the policy world of Washington and half in the financial world of New York. The former is much more Hobbesian and bitter than the latter—and always has been.
After securing victory in World War II, for example, federal policy makers were at each other’s throats over whether to share nuclear technology with the Soviet Union through the Baruch Plan. The branches of the armed services feuded over roles, missions and funding. President Truman and congressional leaders nonetheless produced a few lasting achievements, including the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
But the bitter postwar years also featured terrible blunders in China and Korea. Truman’s radical strategy to shrink the Navy, while declaring Korea outside America’s vital interest, led almost immediately to the Korean War. Journalist John Osborne told me that during those years he was run ragged between the White House and the Pentagon. Both were leaking classified information aimed at opponents in government.
One good result from that strife was the NSC. Defense Secretary James Forrestal conceived of it as a way to corral the dovish White House advisers around Truman. The NSC was established in the 1947 National Security Act, which named the members of the council: president, vice president and secretaries of state and defense. The function of the council “shall be to advise the president with respect to the integration of domestic, foreign, and military policies relating to the national security.” The law required regular meetings.
Truman resented and opposed the NSC. But when it became law, he made it his own White House staff for national security. The State and Defense departments were thus brought into presidential decision-making.
The council’s power and influence reached its apogee under President Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger agreed completely on strategy and intended to run national security from the White House. Predecessors borrowed career staffers from other agencies, but Nixon and Mr. Kissinger recruited a far more diverse and notable policy staff. Candidates were handpicked by Mr. Kissinger and his deputy, Richard Allen. (including my then future International Relations prof William Quandt- MARC)
Mr. Kissinger grew the council to include one deputy, 32 policy professionals and 60 administrators. By my count, alumni of his NSC include two secretaries of state, four national security advisers, a director of national intelligence, a secretary of the Navy, and numerous high-ranking officials in the State, Defense and Treasury departments as well as the Central Intelligence Agency.
But the NSC has only continued to expand. By the end of the Obama administration, 34 policy professionals supported by 60 administrators had exploded to three deputies, more than 400 policy professionals and 1,300 administrators.
The council lost the ability to make fast decisions informed by the best intelligence. The NSC became one more layer in the wedding cake of government agencies. It became difficult to recruit top talent. Mr. Kissinger assembled his 34 from the most elite and prestigious corners of government and industry. The Bush-Obama 400—not so much. It is no coincidence that the NSC declined in usefulness as American foreign policy deteriorated into “endless wars” and so on.
President Trump inherited this system, and it wasn’t functional. It is conceivable that the episodic nature of the administration’s foreign policy is due as much to NSC paralysis, bloat and turnover as to Mr. Trump’s style. The churn of national security advisers hasn’t helped. Michael Flynn, Keith Kellogg (acting), H.R. McMaster, John Bolton, Charles Kupperman (acting) and Mr. O’Brien have all held the job in a little over three years.
But Mr. O’Brien said last fall that he will trim the staff, “making it more effective by reaffirming its mission to coordinate policy and ensure policy implementation. The NSC staff should not, as it has in the past, duplicate the work of military officers, diplomats or intelligence officers.” Since then the policy staff has been reduced by more than 50. There’s more to come.
Since October there have been major improvements in trade, NATO and Mideast policy. There is evidence of a new coherence and direction in White House national security decision-making such as the rapid and effective decision to deal with Iran’s Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani. Perhaps this is a sign of a more nimble and functional security council.
Mr. Lehman served as Navy secretary, 1981-87. His latest book is “Oceans Ventured: Winning the Cold War at Sea
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https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/americas-brexit-taking-back-power-from-the-administrative-state?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTlRabE5UUTFNVFJrTWpJeCIsInQiOiI1UENXQitCZThQcTFrUFpRcHljQ1QrcEx1ZlFGTHVlMllmVE1BSWJncXFBakZyRURZamJzS2dNZDYxV3JXXC85blwvSXdzZ2h3a0wwSjhSYXh5VTRPcHgzVFFUUmFvOXprNmJKVE9ldm5MdytQaUl1dHJVbWhBbHpYOVhqNWZPdDNsIn0%3D
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The justification for unions is for workers to gain equal power to the evil capitalists. The evil capitalist in the public sector is the taxpayer, the voter, the will of the people. Why do we want workers on an equal footing with the will of the people? It makes no sense.
This political cartoon captures part of that cognitive dissonance on the Left:
(https://i2.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2020/06/Screen-Shot-2020-06-09-at-6.22.40-AM.png?w=864&ssl=1)
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I think the explanation
is they Democrats control public unions mostly
(like teachers)
but do not yet control the police unions yet.
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I think the explanation
is they Democrats control public unions mostly
(like teachers)
but do not yet control the police unions yet.
Right. And the political side of this is wrong. The police union is, in the eyes of the Left, preventing the City from controlling the police department. Yes. But the teachers unions are preventing the local school board from making key policy decisions in schools as well.
If they want to fix it, then fix it for all. Don't just play politics. If police don't have that right to organize, then neither do teachers and welfare clerks.
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I was at the Anti-Trust Division of the FTC when President Reagan fired the striking Air Traffic Controllers despite the threats of their union. Glorious to see the freak out in DC!!!
NYC, not being headed by President Reagan, has been anally raped brutally by Transit Union and the Sanitation Union various times.
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-justices-wakeup-call-to-congress-11594767475?mod=opinion_lead_pos9
The Justices’ Wakeup Call to Congress
When it created the CFPB, the legislature gave it immense power. Now, the presidency has a hold of it.
By Mick Mulvaney and Eric Blankenstein
July 14, 2020 6:57 pm ET
The Supreme Court released an underappreciated decision last month that should teach Congress an important lesson about the danger of relinquishing its powers. Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau asked if it was constitutional for Congress to constrain the president’s ability to fire the CFPB director, allowing removal only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” In a 5-4 decision, the court said no.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority that the president’s “unrestricted” authority to remove executive-branch officers is subject to only two exceptions: “one for multimember expert agencies that don’t wield substantial executive power, and one for inferior officers with limited duties and no policymaking or administrative authority.” Since the CFPB director falls into neither of these exceptions, the president can remove her at will.
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Yet the constitutional defect wasn’t fatal to the bureau as a whole. Seven justices agreed that the offending provision was “severable”—it could be struck down while letting the rest of the law stand—reasoning that the lawmakers who created the bureau would have preferred a CFPB supervised by the president to no CFPB. Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch called that “nothing more than speculation” and wrote that they would have decided the case without resolving the question of severability.
The court’s decision to sever the for-cause removal protection creates an ironic outcome. The defining feature of the CFPB has been its extreme independence from the elected branches of government—Congress as well as the president. The 2010 law that created the bureau gave it an automatic funding stream from the Federal Reserve, bypassing the normal congressional appropriations process, and even made it illegal for appropriations subcommittees to review the CFPB budget. It also granted the bureau broad discretion to write rules affecting a substantial portion of the economy and, for good measure, ordered courts to grant those rules deference.
In effect, Congress handed over the keys to its two most potent powers, the power of the purse and the power to make laws, apparently satisfied that the agency would drive on autopilot. But as a result of the Seila decision, President Trump is firmly in the driver’s seat. We hope he uses his newly recognized authority to bring greater accountability to the CFPB, such as by instructing it to follow his executive orders. He could also tell it to draw no further funds from the Fed unless Congress authorizes appropriations or makes other improvements to the bureau—such as requiring legislative approval of the bureau’s major rules.
James Madison advised in Federalist No. 51 that the best way to prevent the concentration of power in one department is to give each coequal branch of government the means to resist encroachment by the others. Our system of checks and balances fundamentally breaks down when Congress abdicates its responsibility to the American people. Perhaps this decision will convince Congress to guard its powers more jealously.
Messrs. Mulvaney and Blankenstein are, respectively, a former acting director and a former policy associate director of the CFPB.
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Trump’s New Chant: Build the Road
Fixing environmental reviews will pay real dividends for years.
By The Editorial Board
July 16, 2020 7:17 pm ET
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President Donald Trump speaks during an event about regulatory reform on the South Lawn of the White House on July 16.
PHOTO: DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES
President Trump often gets itchy to sign some giant public-works spending bill. Here’s a much better gift to America: The White House on Wednesday finished its renovations to the process for environmental reviews. This might sound as dry as old cement, but it’ll help big projects get built for years to come—that is, if President Joe Biden doesn’t use an expedited procedure next year to undo it.
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A 1970 law called the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, mandates an environmental study if a major project involves federal funding or permitting. In 1981 the expectation by the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) was that even for “large complex energy projects,” the whole review process “would require only about 12 months.”
Today that seems heavenly. In recent years the average review involving an environmental impact statement took 4.5 years, and the final document ran to 661 pages, before appendixes. In a quarter of cases, the process burned at least six years and 748 pages. Those timelines don’t necessarily count any subsequent lawsuits over whether the NEPA review was faulty. One sadly spectacular outlier was a 12-mile highway expansion in Denver that took 13 years to get through environmental review.
The Trump Administration’s reforms, which are the first comprehensive update to NEPA rules since 1978, establish presumptive limits. A full environmental impact statement, the new rules say, should take no more than two years and 300 pages. An environmental assessment, which is less intensive, should max out at a year and 75 pages. Going longer will require written permission by “a senior agency official.”
The CEQ estimates that federal agencies complete about 175 impact statements each year, plus 10,000 assessments. Do the math, and in a decade the Trump Administration’s rules could literally cut thousands of years of cumulative delay, speeding everything from interstate highways to gas pipelines to subway lines.
How Long Does an Environmental Impact Statement Take? Completion time for1,276 proposals, 2010-18
Source: The Council on Environmental Quality
Note: EIS completion time in years, from notice of intent to record of decision
YEARS
25th Percentile2.2 years
75th Percentile6.0 years
Average4.5 years
Median3.5 years
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17+
0
50
100
150
200
250
Projects 300
How Long Is an Environmental Impact Statement? Page counts, withoutappendixes, for 656 proposals, 2013-18
Source: The Council on Environmental Quality
100 or under
up to 200
up to 300
up to 400
up to 500
up to 600
up to 700
up to 800
up to 900
up to 1,000
up to 1,100
up to 1,200
up to 1,300
up to 1,400
up to 1,500
up to 1,600
up to 1,700
up to 1,800
up to 1,900
up to 2,000
2,000+
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
Prolonged delays have real costs: They raise the price of building, cause projects to be abandoned, keep drivers wasting gasoline in snaillike traffic, and so forth. Making environmental reviews succinct will be better for informing citizens, since a focused 100-page study is more likely to be read than a flabby 700-page one.
The Trump rule removes language about “cumulative” effects and says that purported environmental consequences “should generally not be considered if they are remote in time, geographically remote, or the product of a lengthy causal chain.” NEPA isn’t intended to assess whether a natural-gas pipeline in the Midwest might cause flooding in Florida in 2100. Impact statements must now include the estimated cost to prepare them, which the CEQ says in the past hasn’t been “routinely tracked.”
If Democrats sweep Washington in November, the danger is that they might overturn this using the Congressional Review Act. That fast-track process requires only a simple majority, bypassing the Senate filibuster. Under the CRA, the 2021 Congress will be able to nix regulations promulgated during this year’s final 60 legislative days. The precise “lookback” window isn’t certain until the adjournment gavel is slammed, but it’s probably here already. Maybe Mr. Trump should switch his 2020 rally chant from “Build the Wall” to “Build the Road.”
No amount of administrative rule-making can bulldoze the legal bog where America’s builders get mired. NEPA, the CEQ emphasizes, is “a procedural statute,” and the Trump Administration’s rules don’t “alter any substantive environmental law or regulation.” That said, these will be much better procedures if they prevent another 13-year study of a 12-mile road.
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https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/draining-the-swamp1/
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https://issuesinsights.com/2021/01/29/bidens-worst-executive-order-went-almost-entirely-unnoticed/
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"Clyde Wayne Crews, a regulation expert at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said that Biden’s order is “likely to do away with cost-benefit analysis by elevating unquantifiable aims as benefits and deny costs of regulation altogether.” In doing so, it will “put weight on the scales of whether or not to regulate such that the answer will always be in the affirmative.”
Obviously, this is the brainchild mostly of Obama and his army of SJWs - and a few radical aging Clintonites.
Obama "the terrible"
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"Clyde Wayne Crews, a regulation expert at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said that Biden’s order is “likely to do away with cost-benefit analysis by elevating unquantifiable aims as benefits and deny costs of regulation altogether.” In doing so, it will “put weight on the scales of whether or not to regulate such that the answer will always be in the affirmative.”
Obviously, this is the brainchild mostly of Obama and his army of SJWs - and a few radical aging Clintonites.
Obama "the terrible"
All I can add is that Democrat administrations weren't doing cost benefit analyses anyway and govern-by-EO will be reversed in the next change of executive power, over and over.
Yes, behind the curtain they are all radicals. Biden is the only one who knew the impeachment trial of private citizen Trump is a bad idea. Maybe Biden is the only one this could come back to bite.
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/bureaucracy-has-conquered-schools-joe-biden-wont-fix-it/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WIR%20-%20Sunday%202021-03-21&utm_term=WIR-Smart
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https://wirepoints.org/mass-federalization-how-washington-is-bailing-out-failed-states-decapitating-competitive-ones-and-ending-america-as-you-knew-it-wirepoints/
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https://www.seattletimes.com/business/economy/washington-adds-more-than-145000-weekly-jobless-claims-as-coronavirus-crisis-lingers/
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/23/the-biden-regime-is-using-the-u-s-postal-service-to-surveil-political-adversaries/
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/23/the-biden-regime-is-using-the-u-s-postal-service-to-surveil-political-adversaries/
https://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2021/04/the-people-have-lost-faith-in-state-and.html
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https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/23/the-biden-regime-is-using-the-u-s-postal-service-to-surveil-political-adversaries/
https://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2021/04/the-people-have-lost-faith-in-state-and.html
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2021/04/23/lee-smith-nails-it-again-the-us-postal-service-surveillance-scandal-is-targeting-trump-supporters-not-all-americans/
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I like the way the article does the work to identify the deep pattern and support its analysis with specifics.
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https://www.breitbart.com/border/2021/04/27/exclusive-chief-of-border-patrol-bucks-biden-will-say-alien-until-law-changes/?fbclid=IwAR1hzFpq6gds63k2XyBscPJpXuMWlzbOvBDdjSw0Slt9VWgB5QF6GlGiEaY
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https://www.bloombergquint.com/gadfly/u-s-innovation-and-competition-act-needs-less-bureaucracy-more-basic-research
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"Bloomberg: Empowering Bureaucracy is no way to spur Economic Growth"
well little Napoleon spent billions helping bring to power a government hell bent on shoving down this country's throat the largest expansion of bureaucracy since 1930's
so Bloomberg News can start there :-(
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/06/19/denies-christian-profit-tax-exempt-status-bibles-teachings-affiliated-republican-party/
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It's been 25 years. Does somebody know what happened? https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/07/twa_800_25_years_of_deep_state_deception.html
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https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2021/03/bureaucracy-smug-bruce-frohnen.html?fbclid=IwAR1ymivov1Fj18bCa9ZUIcnE4dB_YtZIBPitdSRdUDfSWYD_l-X5LIigezw
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https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/senate-approves-3-5-budget-resolution/2021/08/11/id/1031883/
I wonder who sat out on R side
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now I read the bill
itself did not pass
it was the "blueprint" that passed
more fake news
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100 new regulations this year on appliances:
https://www.toddstarnes.com/us/bidens-climate-czar-declares-war-on-kitchen-appliances/
What happened to CONGRESS passing laws and the President signing them?
Talk about kitchen table issues, you can't cook without govt approval?
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Stop asking questions. Just give them more money and do what they tell you. Anything else is radical and possibly terroristic.
Disinformation is terrorism. Questioning the federal government is terrorism.
100 new regulations this year on appliances:
https://www.toddstarnes.com/us/bidens-climate-czar-declares-war-on-kitchen-appliances/
What happened to CONGRESS passing laws and the President signing them?
Talk about kitchen table issues, you can't cook without govt approval?
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I am already cursing the regs on sink faucets (of course thanks to the Great Snake)
that reduce the speed at which water comes out
now to get to the hot water it takes 3 x longer
Trump mentioned this and I thought - EXACTLY right -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHo7aKgHo-s
of course the libs sat their smirking rolling their eyes
and asking what does it mean or have to do with anything
as though the rest of us did not notice
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There are ways to innovate that do not involve a government mandate. But if you're going to have a government mandate, why not have it voted on by the people and their representatives like it says in the Constitution?
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The constitution? Since when has that mattered?
quote author=DougMacG link=topic=2228.msg145634#msg145634 date=1651786392]
There are ways to innovate that do not involve a government mandate. But if you're going to have a government mandate, why not have it voted on by the people and their representatives like it says in the Constitution?
[/quote]
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Our Constitution ALWAYS matters!
It is what makes America AMERICA.
And we must defend it against all enemies, both foreign and domestic!
"If it were to be asked, What is the most sacred duty and the greatest source of our security in a Republic? The answer would be, An inviolable respect for the Constitution and Laws -- the first growing out of the last. ... A sacred respect for the constitutional law is the vital principle, the sustaining energy of a free government." --Alexander Hamilton, Essay in the American Daily Advertiser, 1794
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The American Republic is dead. The country you grew up in no longer exists.
We are tax cattle for the deep state.
Ask those in Garland"s Gulag about their constitutional protections.
Our Constitution ALWAYS matters!
It is what makes America AMERICA.
And we must defend it against all enemies, both foreign and domestic!
"If it were to be asked, What is the most sacred duty and the greatest source of our security in a Republic? The answer would be, An inviolable respect for the Constitution and Laws -- the first growing out of the last. ... A sacred respect for the constitutional law is the vital principle, the sustaining energy of a free government." --Alexander Hamilton, Essay in the American Daily Advertiser, 1794
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The fate of the Republic has hung in the balance before.
I'm an American. I fight to defend our Constitution from all enemies, both foreign and domestic.
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The fate of the Republic has hung in the balance before.
I'm an American. I fight to defend our Constitution from all enemies, both foreign and domestic.
The domestic enemies control the white house, DOD, the FBI/DOJ, the IRS and the IC.
Your move.
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Yup.
Speaking Truth to Power, as all of us do here, is but part of it.
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Yup.
Speaking Truth to Power, as all of us do here, is but part of it.
Speaking truth to power doesn't save you from government empowered famine or ethnic cleansing.
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Duh. Which is why speaking Truth to Power is not the only thing I do-- witness my garden and chickens, witness my abilities to defend myself.
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To maintain a pretense of Separation of Powers, a deeply important part of assessing Agency creation/action is to look at the authorizing legislation-- it must be by "intelligible principle" and meet the Administrative Procedure Act requirements for Due Process.
‘No Statutory Authority Exists’ to Back DHS Disinformation Board, Republican AGs Say, Warning Legal Action
By Rita Li May 6, 2022 Updated: May 7, 2022biggersmaller Print
A group of Republican attorneys general warned of legal action against the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) new Disinformation Governance Board, stating that “no statutory authority” exists to back its creation.
In a letter (pdf) submitted on May 5 to DHS chief Alejandro Mayorkas, Virginia’s Attorney General Jason Miyares, joined by 19 other Republican attorneys general, asked him to “immediately” disband the board that would “police Americans’ protected speech.”
“No statutory authority exists to support your creation of a board of government censors,” reads the letter to Mayorkas.
“Although Congress has considered a variety of measures to address the perceived dangers of ‘disinformation’ in the United States, none has passed. Instead, while the people’s elected representatives continue to debate this issue, you have arrogated to yourself the power to address it without congressional authorization, despite the far-reaching effects of the Disinformation Governance Board on Americans and our political process.”
Mayorkas revealed the new initiative to lawmakers during a congressional hearing on April 27, claiming to protect civil liberties and free speech, as Russia, China, and other adversaries attempt to stoke division and spread conspiracy theories or falsehoods among Americans. White House asserted earlier this week that the recently convened board on misinformation will be “nonpartisan and apolitical.”
Yet the lack of details on how the working group will function and the potential consequences of a government entity identifying and responding to “disinformation,” have drawn widespread controversies.
Calling it “an unacceptable and downright alarming encroachment” on civil rights of free expression, the Republican attorneys general specified in the letter “a chilling effect” that it can bring about nationwide.
“Americans will hesitate before they voice their constitutionally protected opinions, knowing that the government’s censors may be watching, and some will decide it is safer to keep their opinions to themselves.”
Republican members of Congress have already called for the board to be disbanded, before attorneys general threatened legal action in their latest message.
“This is unconstitutional, illegal, and un-American,” the Thursday letter concludes. “Unless you turn back now and disband this Orwellian Disinformation Governance Board immediately, the undersigned will have no choice but to consider judicial remedies to protect the rights of their citizens,” the group said.
Attorneys general from Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia joined the letter.
A spokesman from the DHS didn’t respond immediately to a request for comment.
Timing
The GOP attorneys general also went after what they called “highly suspect” timing of the DHS’s announcement of the board a week ago, following Elon Musk’s Twitter buyout with the stated purpose to pursue free speech.
The Biden administration has been “flagging problematic posts” on social media by its own admission and engaged with Big Techs and private sectors to prevent “disinformation,” the group noted in the letter.
However, Twitter announced on April 25 that it had reached a final agreement to be acquired by Musk for approximately $44 billion. The billionaire tech mogul unveiled days later that the takeover attempt is to reduce the “civilizational risk” to freedom and democracy from excessive and opaque restrictions on expression, although Twitter has repeatedly denied claims of political censorship.
“As [it] apparently loses a critical ally in its campaign to suppress speech it deems ‘problematic,’ you have created a new government body to continue that work within the federal government,” the attorneys general said.
“The contemporaneous occurrence of these two events is hard to explain away as mere coincidence. It instead raises troubling questions about the extent of the Biden Administration’s practice of coordinating with private-sector companies to suppress disfavored speech.”
The appointment of the executive director of the board, Nina Jankowicz, flagged a “clearer illustration,” according to the letter.
The former disinformation fellow at Washington-based think tank Wilson Center previously questioned the veracity of stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop and suggested the COVID-19 lab-leak theory was “politically” made up at the convenience of former President Donald Trump.
Jankowicz has come under fire for parodying a Christmas song to make it sexually explicit and adapting the Mary Poppins “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” song into a tune about fake news and disinformation.
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This is a BFD!
======================================================
Constitutional Thunder Out of the Fifth Circuit
An appeals court ruling against the Securities and Exchange Commission is a blow to the runaway administrative state.
By The Editorial BoardFollow
May 22, 2022 4:27 pm ET
That rumble you hear in the distance is federal courts moving to re-establish the proper understanding of the Constitution’s separation of powers. The latest legal bombshell is a decision last week by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals (based in Louisiana) against the Securities and Exchange Commission.
***
The case involves hedge-fund founder George Jarkesy and an investment adviser, and it goes to the heart of whether the Constitution still protects individual liberty. In 2013 the SEC charged the pair with securities fraud for allegedly inflating the value of fund assets. The agency said the higher valuation allowed them to earn higher management fees.
Mr. Jarkesy wasn’t allowed to defend himself in a court under Article III of the Constitution. Instead the case came before an SEC administrative law judge, who ruled against Mr. Jarkesy and his business partner. The commissioners then affirmed the decision and ordered them to pay a civil penalty and disgorge allegedly ill-gotten gains. The commission barred Mr. Jarkesy from the securities industry.
Merits of the case aside, the constitutional problem is that the SEC acted as prosecutor, judge and jury. The Dodd-Frank Act lets the SEC decide whether to bring charges in its own tribunal or federal court. The agency usually chooses the former, as do other agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission.
Enter the Fifth Circuit, which held in Jarkesy v. SEC that the SEC’s tribunals, as currently structured, violate the Seventh Amendment’s right to trial by jury. As Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod explains for the 2-1 panel majority, the jury guarantee applies to all suits of “common law,” as understood at the time of the founding. This includes fraud prosecutions.
The Fifth Circuit also ruled that Congress’s delegation of legislative power to the SEC to decide where to bring fraud enforcement actions violates the Constitution’s separation of powers. Congress may grant agencies prosecutorial discretion to decide what cases to bring, Judge Elrod noted, but it cannot give them free rein to decide their judicial forum.
Notably, she cites Justice Neil Gorsuch’s dissent in Gundy v. U.S. (2019) in which he said the Supreme Court should revisit its nondelegation doctrine that has given too much leeway to the executive branch to perform legislative functions. Two new conservative Justices have joined the Court since Gundy and may be willing to take up their colleague’s invitation.
It gets better. The Fifth Circuit found that the job protections of administrative law judges violate the constitutional imperative that the President “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” The Supreme Court has interpreted this to mean that a President must have power over officers’ appointment and removal.
Yet SEC judges can only be removed by the five SEC commissioners if the government’s Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) finds cause. Commissioners and MSPB members can only be removed by the President for cause. SEC judges are insulated from Presidential removal by two layers of for-cause protection. This violates the Court’s Free Enterprise Fund (2010) precedent.
All of this is a blow to the SEC, but it’s a blessing for the proper understanding of the Constitution. The agency isn’t used to losing cases since defendants often settle to avoid the expense and hassle of litigation. Credit to Mr. Jarkesy for fighting back. The Biden Administration could seek an en banc review of the panel decision, but Judge Elrod’s opinion is sound and unlikely to be reversed by the full Fifth Circuit.
The ruling applies only to the SEC, but it could encourage similar challenges against other independent agencies. Some conservative Justices have hinted that they’d like to overturn the Court’s wrong-headed Humphrey’s Executor (1935) precedent that upheld limitations on the President’s ability to remove members of bipartisan independent agencies. The Biden Administration will have to decide if it wants to take that risk by appealing to the Supreme Court.
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High Court watchers are preoccupied these days with looming decisions on social issues, especially abortion and gun rights. But the movement to rein in the runaway administrative state is arguably more important for limiting government and protecting liberty. This is an essential project of the conservative judicial movement, and the Fifth Circuit ruling shows the thunder coming from the judicial provinces.
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https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/supreme-court-deals-biden-climate-agenda-serious-blow-epa-decision?fbclid=IwAR1WJuO0436VGM5xe0bMXH9AVIX0tuXCle9LmToil9DFqWAPX8OcyNAWobk
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Second
Chief Justice Roberts Reins In the Pen-and-Phone EPA
Left: U.S. President Barack Obama and U.S. Vice President Joe Biden at the White House in Washington, November 9, 2016. Right: Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts in Washington, January 21, 2020. (Joshua Roberts/U.S. Senate TV/Reuters, Handout via Reuters )
By DAN MCLAUGHLIN
June 30, 2022 1:54 PM
The Court tells the EPA that it needs Congress if it wants to pass carbon-emissions laws.
The Supreme Court ended this momentous term the way it began: telling a federal administrative agency that it had overstepped its powers by writing laws without the authority of Congress. This time, it was the Environmental Protection Agency and its Obama-era Clean Power Plan rule, which sought to require existing coal-fired and natural gas-fired power plants to reduce carbon emissions by producing less electricity or converting to green-energy sources — as the Court described its aim, to “compel the transfer of power generating capacity from existing sources to wind and solar.” This is one last loss for Barack Obama’s “pen and phone” strategy to use the executive branch to write laws that Obama could not get through Congress after the 2010 and 2014 elections.
In terms of outcomes, the last day of the Court’s term ended with split decisions characteristic of Chief Justice John Roberts: The 6–3 Roberts opinion in West Virginia v. EPA striking down the Clean Power Plan rule was coupled with a 5–4 Roberts opinion in Biden v. Texas upholding the Biden administration’s power to undo the 2019 Trump-instituted Migrant Protection Protocols, also known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy. EPA was a clean split between the six conservative and three liberal justices; in Texas, Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined with the three liberals, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote that she agreed with their analysis of the legality of the policy but procedurally would not have ruled on the issue.
The EPA case was not the sweeping, root-and-branch rebuke to the administrative state that some conservatives had hoped for. The Court did not rule on whether Congress has the constitutional power to regulate carbon emissions from stationary power plants. It did not rule on the nondelegation doctrine — i.e., whether or to what extent Congress could constitutionally delegate power to the EPA to write such a rule. And it did not, at least directly, rule on the continuing viability of the Chevron doctrine or any of the other doctrines under which courts defer to administrative agencies in interpreting the law.
The Major Question
For all of that, EPA is still a pretty big win for democracy and separation of powers, capping off a momentous term full of such victories. The Court applied the “major questions” doctrine and concluded that the Clean Power Plan rule was such a significant policy that the agency needed clear statutory authority before it could assert the power to regulate. This is, if anything, a reversal of any deferential presumption favoring the administrative state:
In certain extraordinary cases, both separation of powers principles and a practical understanding of legislative intent make us reluctant to read into ambiguous statutory text the delegation claimed to be lurking there. . . . To convince us otherwise, something more than a merely plausible textual basis for the agency action is necessary. The agency instead must point to clear congressional authorization for the power it claims.
You might think that asking a federal agency “on whose authority?” or “who gave you the power to do that?” should be the ordinary right of any American citizen living under a government of limited and enumerated powers. You might think that “something more than a merely plausible textual basis” is required any time the federal government claims the power to limit our life, liberty, or property. Courts are, however, typically more deferential than this if a regulation is not deemed to address a “major question.” It is the non-major questions that are governed by presumptions such as Chevron.
Now, as I explained in January, “the major-questions doctrine . . . is not actually a freestanding constitutional rule, but rather a rule of construction: courts should not presume that Congress has delegated authority to an agency on a particular topic if that authority is not explicit and the topic is a big, contentious national debate.” As the Court has said repeatedly, it will not presume that Congress hides “elephants in mouseholes”: Big grants of power on controversial issues are not to be magically discovered in vague or offhand language.
There is a major constitutional concern looming behind this doctrine: The separation of powers is undermined if executive agencies can assume the job of Congress by writing detailed laws on subjects Congress has addressed only obliquely. When Congress has clearly delegated that kind of authority in an open-ended fashion, the nondelegation doctrine comes into play to limit how much legislative power can be delegated to the executive. But what the major-questions doctrine actually does is apply a statutory canon of interpretation: The bigger the power exercised by the agency, the closer courts will look at the statutory basis for it.
If all of this sounds familiar, the Court has applied this doctrine before in environmental cases, in the Food and Drug Administration’s efforts to regulate cigarettes, and in the Biden administration’s Covid policies. As Roberts noted today, “such cases have arisen from all corners of the administrative state.” Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurring opinion, joined by Justice Samuel Alito, made the case for the historical bases of the major-questions doctrine dating back to the 19th century, and took a barbed shot at Obama: “When Congress seems slow to solve problems, it may be only natural that those in the Executive Branch might seek to take matters into their own hands. But the Constitution does not authorize agencies to use pen-and-phone regulations as substitutes for laws passed by the people’s representatives.”
The Biden administration has not kicked that habit. The Court began this term in August by finding that Congress never gave the CDC the power to issue a nationwide evictions moratorium. In January, the Court held that Congress never gave the Occupational Safety and Health Administration the power to issue a nationwide employer vaccine mandate, although the Court upheld the power of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to issue such a mandate for health-care workers employed by Medicare and Medicaid providers.
It is not some sort of rogue judicial activism for courts to apply canons of interpretation in reading statutes; judges have been doing that forever, and every law student is stuffed with Latin phrases reflecting the many such rules developed over time. Justice Antonin Scalia co-wrote an entire 400-page book with Bryan Garner detailing and explaining those rules. To the extent there is a case against the major-questions doctrine, however, the best argument would be that the courts should use the same approach for all assertions of administrative-agency legislative power.
The Job of Congress
The Clean Power Plan rule was draconian. As the Court observed, it imposed “numerical emissions ceilings so strict that no existing coal plant would have been able to achieve them” without shifting to a different method of energy production. “Indeed, the emissions limit the Clean Power Plan established for existing power plants was actually stricter than the cap imposed by the simultaneously published standards for new plants.” That inverted the standards Congress wrote in the EPA’s statute, the Clean Air Act, which granted more extensive powers over new plants than existing ones.
The Obama rule was still tied up in court when the Trump EPA repealed it in 2019. But as Roberts noted in another recent case, he is skeptical of efforts by agencies to use changes of administration as a way around judicial review of normal administrative procedures. The Biden administration argued that the case was moot because the rules had been repealed, but it vigorously argued that the rules were legal and gave every indication of wanting them reimposed, so the Court concluded that the dispute remains a live one.
Roberts, walking through the many previous disputes in which the major-questions doctrine has been explicitly or implicitly applied, explained why the Court remains vigilant about administrative overreach:
All of these regulatory assertions had a colorable textual basis. And yet, in each case, given the various circumstances, common sense as to the manner in which Congress would have been likely to delegate such power to the agency at issue, . . . made it very unlikely that Congress had actually done so. Extraordinary grants of regulatory authority are rarely accomplished through modest words, vague terms, or subtle devices. . . . Nor does Congress typically use oblique or elliptical language to empower an agency to make a radical or fundamental change to a statutory scheme. Agencies have only those powers given to them by Congress, and enabling legislation is generally not an open book to which the agency may add pages and change the plot line. . . . We presume that Congress intends to make major policy decisions itself, not leave those decisions to agencies.
The Court noted two big red flags of a major question: The EPA was asserting a new power it had not previously claimed, and it was trying to enact a rule only after efforts to get it through Congress as a new law had failed. Roberts had no doubt that the EPA was trying to write a law on a major question:
EPA claimed to discover in a long-extant statute an unheralded power representing a “transformative expansion in its regulatory authority. . . . It located that newfound power in the vague language of an ancillary provision of the Act, . . . one that was designed to function as a gap filler and had rarely been used in the preceding decades. And the Agency’s discovery allowed it to adopt a regulatory program that Congress had conspicuously and repeatedly declined to enact itself.
Roberts quoted Justice Felix Frankfurter in 1941 on why courts should be skeptical of brand-new claims of a discovered power: “Just as established practice may shed light on the extent of power conveyed by general statutory language, so the want of assertion of power by those who presumably would be alert to exercise it, is equally significant in determining whether such power was actually conferred.” He also caught the EPA admitting that it was doing something new, yet another object lesson in the difficulty of maintaining a legal position that is at odds with what the political branches say in public:
There is little reason to think Congress assigned such decisions to the Agency. For one thing, as EPA itself admitted when requesting special funding, “Understand[ing] and project[ing] system-wide . . . trends in areas such as electricity transmission, distribution, and storage” requires “technical and policy expertise not traditionally needed in EPA regulatory development.” . . . When an agency has no comparative expertise in making certain policy judgments, we have said, Congress presumably would not task it with doing so.
One wishes that Roberts had applied a similar skepticism when the IRS admitted it was passing an Obamacare rule “regardless” of the statutory language, but today’s decision takes the separation of powers more seriously than that.
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Off the top of my head this sounds like a super good idea:
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/chip-roy-introduces-bill-that-would-allow-the-president-to-fire-executive-branch-employees/?fbclid=IwAR2wyRA-MuWwFk7ierMA3wMiBNacnCi5By1YtnRnGjhhC-JOoiSHENwVzhI
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160,000 public comments "missing" on Biden's Title IX sex redefinition proposal: The Biden administration is blaming a sudden decrease of public comments posted on the Regulations.gov website regarding the Department of Education's proposed redefinition of "sex" to Title IX protections on a "clerical error." The Biden administration has been pushing the proposal to redefine the Title IX designation of "sex" to include sexual orientation and gender identity. This change would effectively allow biological men to access female-only facilities such as bathrooms and locker rooms, as well as codify their right to participate on female sports teams for all colleges and universities that receive federal funding. The dubious "clerical error" eliminated 163,000 public comments from a total of more than 349,000. Making the matter even more fishy is the discrepancy between the Federal Register, which lists the total number of comments with none eliminated, and Regulations.gov, which curates to remove duplicates or spam comments. The Federal Register logs 21,000 fewer comments than Regulations.gov, which should be a technical impossibility. As Sarah Parshall Perry, senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, observes: "The Department of Education's claim that the error in the number of comments is due to a clerical error doesn't pass the smell test. Far more likely is that they don't want the American people to know how unpopular this policy change is."
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/sep/19/why-firing-federal-employees-doesnt-work-study-fin/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=morning&utm_term=newsletter&utm_content=morning&bt_ee=6aHQOFsQaAroHNt2%2BKK%2BdSTNSHtgb%2B1yEa728yLkcOARfh7EEDlvMoXDfNHzPBAM&bt_ts=1663667152496
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/11/the-supreme-court-gets-another-chance-to-rein-in-the-administrative-state/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Daily%20Monday%20through%20Friday%202022-11-03&utm_term=NRDaily-Smart
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As the Supreme Court’s originalists reinvigorate the separation of powers, federal agencies are fighting to dodge constitutional challenges to their political overreach. On Monday the Justices will consider in two cases whether to let them (Axon Enterprise v. FTC and SEC v. Cochran).
A bedrock constitutional principle is that Congress writes the laws, the executive enforces them, and the judiciary interprets them. This vital separation safeguards individual liberty. But independent agencies—the so-called fourth branch of government—have grown to accumulate all three powers, and they too often seek to supersede Congress and the judiciary.
Consider police body camera maker Axon’s run-in with the Federal Trade Commission. Axon says the agency threatened to force it via an administrative proceeding to divest a small acquisition and stand up a competitor using its intellectual property. The FTC almost always wins the cases it brings in its own tribunal since it plays investigator, prosecutor and judge.
Axon sued in federal court, arguing that FTC administrative law judges are exercising unconstitutional power. They have dual-layer protections from presidential removal, and the agency’s combination of “investigatory, prosecutorial, adjudicative, and appellate functions” violates the separation of powers.
The agency, however, said Axon would have to wait until the FTC finished its administrative process and was slapped with a potentially ruinous judgment before bringing its constitutional challenge in federal court. In other words, only after the FTC crushes you can you challenge its power to do so. The FTC’s argument flouts law and Supreme Court precedent.
Congress expressly gave federal district courts “original jurisdiction of all civil actions arising under the Constitution, laws, or treaties of the United States.” While the FTC Act requires defendants to wait for the commission to render a final order before appealing in court, Congress didn’t restrict judicial review of constitutional challenges.
The High Court’s Free Enterprise Fund (2010) decision upheld federal court jurisdiction over a similar constitutional challenge to the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion that the government “offers no reason and cites no authority why” separation-of-powers challenges are different than other complaints of constitutional violations.
Now the FTC argues that Congress implicitly stripped federal district courts of jurisdiction by expressly providing appellate court review of final agency orders. In a separate case before the Supreme Court, the Securities and Exchange Commission makes the same argument concerning a constitutional challenge to removal restrictions for its administrative law judges.
But as the defendant in the SEC case argues, “proceedings frequently drag on for several years and take such an enormous personal, financial, and reputational toll on their targets that most—despite vigorously asserting their innocence—are forced to capitulate.” Preventing constitutional challenges until a punishment is rendered has the effect of denying plaintiffs the right to judicial review.
Administrative agencies are compounding their constitutional abuses by throwing up roadblocks for defendants to obtain relief. In doing so, they’re underscoring why courts need to keep them in check.
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How Can a Trial Be Fair When the Judge Works for the Prosecutor?
Federal agencies also make the laws and hear appeals. The Supreme Court should take a skeptical look.
By Peggy Little
Nov. 6, 2022 4:27 pm ET
The United States Supreme Court building in Washington.
PHOTO: MICHAEL REYNOLDS/SHUTTERSTOCK
The ever-expanding administrative state has become a fourth branch of government. Unelected, unaccountable and tenure-protected bureaucrats enact most rules governing Americans’ lives—thousands of new ones every year.
Seeking to aid this swelling administrative state, Congress has created in-house courts, which have taken over most regulatory enforcement cases from the judiciary. These administrative-law judges are employed by the same agency that brings the prosecutions. Unsurprisingly, the agency wins the vast majority of cases—90% at the Securities and Exchange Commission and 100% at the Federal Trade Commission. Worse, these administrative adjudications trap citizens in costly yearslong proceedings.
Michelle Cochran, a Texas certified public accountant, has been ensnared in costly and repeated SEC adjudications for more than six years. Hers is one of two cases, SEC v. Cochran and Axon v. FTC, that the Supreme Court will hear Monday. The question in both cases is whether Americans hauled before agency ALJs can challenge the ALJ’s unconstitutional removal protections in federal district courts before such unconstitutional proceedings take place.
As it stands, these ALJs can’t be removed by any one person and are structurally beholden to the agency that employs them. Put another way, the constitutional system’s separation of powers made it imperative that the judicial power be separated from the executive. These ALJs are accountable to no one—not the president, not the judiciary (which they purport to replace) and least of all the electorate.
These structurally biased in-house courts strip Americans of their constitutional rights to due process and jury trials, shift the burden of proof from the government to the accused, deprive citizens of the protections of the Federal Rules of Evidence and Civil Procedure, and eviscerate meaningful judicial review—all essential conditions for the fair and impartial administration of justice.
Ms. Cochran worked for a difficult boss who disregarded accounting rules and was the real subject of SEC concern. Ms. Cochran had quit her job in 2013 for those reasons. Nonetheless, the SEC included her as an ancillary target of its 2016 charges though no losses or damages were connected to her work.
Blindsided by these charges dating back some six years, and unable to find a lawyer willing to represent her in a forum where the SEC almost always wins, Ms. Cochran defended the action without an attorney before an administrative-law judge who publicly boasted that he had never ruled against the agency. In 2017 the ALJ hit her with a $22,500 fine and a draconian five-year professional suspension.
In 2018, before her decision was final, the Supreme Court ruled in Lucia v. SEC that the SEC’s administrative-law judges hadn’t been constitutionally appointed. That vacated the decision against Ms. Cochran. She was forced to defend herself all over again before a new ALJ. That eight years had passed since the events in dispute hamstrung her ability to mount a defense.
The new SEC judge assigned to her case was still at least doubly insulated from removal by the president—or any one person—which both the Supreme Court held in Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (2010), and as the government argued in Lucia was unconstitutional. The high court also unanimously held in Free Enterprise Fund that federal courts have jurisdiction to decide such structural constitutional claims. So Ms. Cochran, determined to retain her hard-won right to practice as a CPA, must be allowed to sue in federal court to vindicate her right to be tried only once—and in a constitutional tribunal.
Supported by flawed precedents in five U.S. circuit courts of appeals, the SEC was able to have her case dismissed. The federal district judge who ordered dismissal recognized the injustice: “The court is deeply concerned with the fact that plaintiff already has been subjected to extensive proceedings before an ALJ who was not constitutionally appointed. . . . She should not have been put to the stress of the first proceedings, and, if she is correct in her contentions, she again will be put to further proceedings, undoubtedly at considerable expense and stress, before another unconstitutionally appointed administrative law judge.” Ms. Cochran faced another ALJ decision that would eventually be reviewed and vacated—setting her up for a third trial.
This madness isn’t confined to the SEC. Axon Enterprise, Inc., an Arizona maker of police body cameras, was in a similar bind. The FTC sought to block its acquisition of a small competitor on antitrust grounds without any showing of an anticompetitive effect. Axon was willing to divest the company but balked when the FTC demanded that Axon surrender its intellectual property to the now-competitor. Rather than submit to a yearslong administrative trial the FTC was sure to win, Axon sued in district court so that its case might be heard before a constitutional adjudicator. Axon, like Ms. Cochran, was denied relief and also lost on appeal over a powerful dissent.
Ms. Cochran persuaded a majority of the judges on the entire Fifth Circuit that this process makes no sense. Her victory created the circuit split that brought Ms. Cochran and Axon to the Supreme Court.
These challenges have the potential to turn around decades of accretion of judicial power in administrative agencies. Thomas Jefferson wrote that “the most sacred of the duties of a government” is “to do equal and impartial justice to all of its citizens.” An agency that serves as lawmaker, prosecutor, judge and court of appeal makes a mockery of Jefferson’s aspiration.
Ms. Little is senior litigation counsel at the New Civil Liberties Alliance, which represents Michelle Cochran.
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FISHING FOR A FIGHT
Gorsuch has controversial 1984 regulatory case in sight
BY STEPHEN DINAN AND ALEX SWOYER THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch was expected to be conservatives’ barbarian at the gates of big government, leading a charge to tear down the 1984 case they pinpoint as a legal justification for expansion of the regulatory state.
Those hopes were inflated by the confirmation of two more Trump appointees to the high court, delivering what conservative legal scholars thought might be reinforcement for the effort to tear down Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council.
Yet Chevron remains, having survived myriad chances to strike it from the books.
The latest miss came last month, in a case involving the Department of Veterans Affairs’ interpretation of rules governing disability coverage. The high court declined to take the case, sparking a spirited dissent from Justice Gorsuch, who said it was time to dustbin Chevron.
“At this late hour, the whole project deserves a tombstone no one can miss,” he wrote.
None of his colleagues joined his dissent, but he will get another chance to try to sway them soon in a case filed by fishers who complain that the National Marine Fisheries Service has run amok with a plan to charge fishing vessels as much as $700 a day to hire a monitor to police their catch.
The fishers lost in the federal appeals court, 2-1, in a ruling in which the majority cited Chevron in deferring to the agency’s judgment.
“Judges are supposed to be a check on executive-branch abuses, but Chevron deference turns that upside down and transforms judges into rubber stamps for the whims of the federal bureaucracy,” Stefan Axelsson, captain of a fishing vessel in New Jersey, wrote in the National Review this month.
The Fisheries Service is delaying the program until next year. The fishers are asking the high court to hear their case and get a final ruling on what the law allows.
“Chevron deference” is the term of art lawyers gave to how courts have treated the 1984 ruling, which involved a fight between the energy giant and the Environmental Protection Agency and its environmental allies. The court, in a 6-3 ruling, said the EPA’s interpretation of a law was reasonable and that courts should defer to agency judgment in cases in which the law was ambiguous.
To defenders, it blazed a path to good government, putting the experts at federal agencies in charge of the finer points of policy making.
To detractors, Chevron is the stuff of Orwellian dystopias, siphoning massive amounts of political power away from Congress and the courts and turning it over to unelected and usually anonymous bureaucrats.
In the ensuing decades, the case has become legendary, less for what it said than the way it has been used by some lower courts — particularly the appeals court in Washington that handles so many agency cases — to create a presumption in favor of an agency’s decisions.
“The problem with Chevron isn’t the initial decision, it’s the fact that some of the time afterward, some courts treat it as if it’s giving the agency the authority to interpret the law instead of the court,” said Ronald A. Cass, former dean emeritus of Boston University School of Law.
He has called Chevron “the most talked about, most written about, most cited administrative law decision of the Supreme Court. Ever.”
It played a major role at Justice Gorsuch’s confirmation hearing, with the then-nominee drawing cheers from Republicans for saying it was time judges got back on the playing field and reined in agencies that freelanced beyond the corners of the law.
After two more Trump additions, Justices Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, legal scholars were predicting the “death of Chevron.”
But a series of cases that presented such an opportunity came and went without a death blow.
Legal scholars offered several reasons for its staying power.
“Overruling Chevron may seem like a good idea when there is a Democratic administration, but will frustrate a Republican president as well. The court will likely keep the status quo,” said Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law.
Adam Feldman, a Supreme Court expert and creator of Empirical SCOTUS, said the high court likely has three justices — Samuel A. Alito Jr., Clarence Thomas and Justice Gorsuch — who would be willing to revisit Chevron.
But when it comes to the other GOP appointees, their willingness to overturn the precedent is unclear.
“The justices are still trying to defi ne their role in implementation of congressional policies. As long as the agencies are in some control, the court isn’t pit directly against Congress as often. The oversight will change if deference to agencies diminish,” he said. “I think this might frighten some of the justices on the fence from totally overruling Chevron and then having to go back to a system where the court is really monitoring Congress’ actions more closely.”
Mr. Cass said justices don’t see a need to overrule the decision because they aren’t particularly restrained by it.
“They’ve been ignoring it when they don’t feel like it has anything to say that they want to hear,” he said.
For Justice Gorsuch, ignoring it isn’t good enough.
And he said there are real-world consequences. For example, Thomas H. Buffington, the veteran who challenged the VA’s interpretation of disability benefi ts, won’t get the assistance Congress might have intended.
“Maybe Chevron maximalism has died of its own weight and is already effectively buried. But even if all that’s true, it offers little comfort for Mr. Buffington and the future veterans who will be forced to live with the VA’s rule and the federal circuit’s precedent,” Justice Gorsuch scolded. “The same goes for other Americans who still find themselves caught in Chevron’s maw from time to time. No measure of silence (on this court’s part) and no number of separate writings (on my part and so many others) will protect them.”
SOMETHING SMELLS FISHY: A legal case filed by fishers complained that the National Marine Fisheries Service has run amok with a plan to charge fishing vessels to hire a monitor to police their catch. The fishers are asking that the high court hear the case. ASSOCIATED PRESS PHOTOGRAPHS
AGAINST: Justice Neil M. Gorsuch’s spirited dissent on a case called for overturning the Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council ruling.
For defenders of the Chevron case, it blazed a path to good government, putting experts at federal agencies in charge of the finer points of policy making. For detectors, it’s the stuff of nightmares and shifts power away from Congress and courts. ASSOCIATED PRESS
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Actually, I am surprised at the effort made herein for legal literacy.
That said, the article misses the major point-- which is Separation of Powers-- the executive branch is not a legislative power.
There is also the matter of the limits of the grant of quasi-legislative power under the statute e.g. reaching well beyond work place safety in an effort to require vaxxes. The President does not get to bootstrap beyond the limits of the grant of power to the agency.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/a-federal-court-just-took-judicial-obstruction-of-biden-s-presidency-to-a-new-level/ar-AA15uYX9?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=d6e7d49ea3b442b49d9a83f6c2f59fe1
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Supreme Court to look at CFPB case on budget, Congress
Created 12 years ago as part of Dodd-Frank law
BY DAVE BOYER THE WASHINGTON TIMES
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau could be nearing the end of its run as a regulator free from Congress controlling its budget.
The bureau, which is funded by the Federal Reserve, is asking the conservative Supreme Court to uphold that arrangement, which Republicans say is unconstitutional. But the CFPB’s legal arguments to the high court contradict its long-standing position that it doesn’t receive appropriations from Congress.
The Biden administration, confronted with a federal appeals court ruling that found the CFPB’s funding method violates the Constitution, has asked the Supreme Court to hear an appeal and make a decision by this spring. The administration said the ruling “calls into question virtually every action the CFPB has taken in the 12 years since it was created,” and that leaving the agency’s funding in limbo would have “major” consequences for the U.S. financial industry.
Analysts say the problem has been brewing ever since Congress created the CFPB for consumer protection in 2010 as part of the Dodd-Frank law imposing more regulations on the financial services industry. The legislation was a response to the Wall Street meltdown of 2008-09.
“There’s always been from the very beginning clouds of legal uncertainty around the CFPB,” said Adam White, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and co-director of George Mason University’s Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State. “The Biden administration is clearly very keen to get this in front of the justices.”
The CFPB was conceived largely by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts Democrat, when she was a professor at Harvard University. Its mission is to police against “unfair, deceptive, or abusive” business practices in areas ranging from credit cards to payday loans.
Over 12 years, the CFPB has sent more than 3.3 million consumer complaints to companies, with a 98% timely response rate by financial firms, according to the House Financial Services Committee. It has delivered more than $14.9 billion in monetary compensation, principal reductions, canceled debts and other consumer relief.
Among its recent actions, the bureau reached a $3.7 billion settlement with Wells Fargo this month over abuses tied to mortgages, auto loans and overdraft fees.
The bank was ordered to pay a $1.7 billion civil penalty and more than $2 billion “in redress to consumers,” the CFPB said.
To ensure the CFPB’s independence, lawmakers set up its funding to come directly from the Fed instead of annual congressional appropriations. The agency’s director is authorized to request whatever funding he or she believes is “reasonably necessary” to carry out CFPB’s operations, as long as the amount doesn’t exceed 12% of the Federal Reserve’s “total operating expenses.” (The bureau was allowed to exceed the cap by $200 million in each of its first five years as long as it notifi ed the president and Congress of any anticipated surplus).
For fiscal 2022, the CFPB requested $642 million for operations that include 1,600 employees. In 2018, the bureau requested $381 million.
The bureau is headed by a sole director appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Current Director Rohit Chopra was nominated by President Biden and confirmed by the Senate for a five-year term in September 2021.
Conservatives have long argued that the CFPB isn’t accountable to voters because it evades Congress’ power of the purse. They have criticized the bureau under Democratic administrations as a regulator run amok, saddling businesses with a wide array of new red tape such as the Payday Lending Rule, which was crafted during the Obama administration and finalized during the first year of the Trump administration.
The complaints came to a head on Oct. 19, when the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the Payday Lending Rule because, the judges said, the CFPB’s funding is unconstitutional. The court said that the bureau’s “perpetual insulation from Congress’s appropriations power, including the express exemption from congressional review of its funding, renders the bureau ‘no longer dependent and, as a result, no longer accountable’ to Congress and, ultimately, to the people.”
By creating this self-funding system, the court ruled, “Congress ran afoul of the separation of powers embodied in the Appropriations Clause.”
In urging the Supreme Court to hear its appeal of the ruling, the Biden administration said the Fifth Circuit relied on an “erroneous” interpretation of the Constitution’s Appropriations Clause.
“Congress enacted a statute explicitly authorizing the CFPB to use a specified amount of funds from a specified source for specifi ed purposes,” the administration said in its brief. “The Appropriations Clause requires nothing more.”
The CFPB said its funding method “indisputably establishes an appropriation under the longaccepted understanding of that term.”
But Mr. White points out that the bureau and its leaders have consistently and repeatedly claimed since its creation that the CFPB does not receive “appropriations.”
Among the examples, then-Director Richard Cordray testifi ed to Congress in 2012 that the bureau’s revenues were “nonappropriated funds.” And the bureau’s annual report in 2014 said Dodd-Frank gave it “a source of funding outside the appropriations process.”
“The agency itself, throughout its entire life, has insisted that its funding is not appropriations,” Mr. White said. “Suddenly, the agency has discovered that all along it did get appropriations. I don’t think the agency has been that foolish for that long. I think they are now suddenly changing their story and trying to reframe what Dodd-Frank did. Dodd-Frank was not an appropriation statute.”
The CFPB’s legal brief to the Supreme Court said Congress “is free to modify the Bureau’s funding at any time by simply passing a statute.” It also notes that the federal Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld the CFPB’s funding mechanism because it “fits within the tradition of independent financial regulators.”
The Biden administration said it’s worried that the Fifth Circuit’s ruling will invite new legal challenges to the CFPB’s regulations and will frustrate its “critical work administering and enforcing consumer financial protection laws.”
For example, the administration said if CFPB’s regulations on home loans were vacated, “mortgage lenders would have to immediately modify the disclosures they give millions of consumers each year, and borrowers could seek to rescind certain mortgage transactions that had relied on regulatory disclosure exceptions.” The Mortgage Bankers Association, National Association of Home Builders, and National Association of Realtors have warned that calling into question the CFPB’s past actions could bring “catastrophic” results for the real estate finance industry.
Mr. White dismissed the claim that a Supreme Court ruling against the CFPB would result in economic chaos.
“American financial institutions’ fortunes do not rise and fall merely on the existence of a single federal agency,” he said. “To the extent that the CFPB has for a decade leveraged enormous power over financial institutions based on an extremely shaky constitutional foundation, that reflects a mistake of the CFPB and of the people who created it.”
At a House Financial Services Committee hearing on Dec. 14, Mr. Chopra said the CFPB is taking a variety of actions, including issuing orders to Big Tech firms regarding their use of payment platforms such as Apple Pay, PayPal and Venmo. He said the bureau wants to know “what data they are extracting from transactions and whether they can use that data to preference their other business lines.”
“We are also particularly interested in how these payment platforms implement existing consumer protections, as well as how they make decisions on account approvals, freezes, and terminations,” Mr. Chopra said.
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https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/what-us-gas-stove-ban-really-about?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=1184
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The Chamber of Commerce Will Fight the FTC
We’ll go to court if necessary to stop the legally baseless ban on noncompete clauses.
By Suzanne P. Clark
Jan. 22, 2023 3:29 pm ET
When Lina Khan assumed the chairmanship of the Federal Trade Commission, she said her goal was to “shape the distribution of power and opportunity across our economy.” Her proposed ban on all employment-based noncompete agreements suggests she doesn’t intend to let the law or Constitution get in her way.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce will oppose the proposed regulation with all the tools at our disposal, including litigation. If the FTC can regulate noncompete agreements without authorization from Congress, there is no aspect of employment or commercial arrangements that it doesn’t have the authority to regulate or ban arbitrarily.
In its more than 100-year history, the FTC has never enforced a rule to regulate competition, and Congress never intended the agency to have that power. Instead, legislators gave the FTC authority to identify on a case-by-case basis individual acts that constitute unfair competition. Critically, this authority is subject to judicial oversight.
This structure has been a key to preserving innovation in a free market and avoiding overregulation. It prevents the FTC from writing the laws it is assigned to enforce, which is necessary to protect the constitutional separation of powers.
Yet the present FTC isn’t content to live under the legal strictures imposed by elected representatives and the Constitution. Before issuing the proposed noncompete ban, the FTC issued a radical reinterpretation of the agency’s authority under Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, which governs “unfair methods of competition.” This means the FTC is walking away from having to weigh consumer benefits against consumer harms or even identify actual harm to consumers. In her dissent, FTC Commissioner Christine Wilson slammed the new rules for giving the agency “authority summarily to condemn essentially any business conduct it finds distasteful.”
The proposed regulation to ban noncompetes takes this one step further. Rather than reviewing and judging the specific and individual conduct of companies under Section 5, the FTC has proposed simply to issue a nationwide ban of a type of employment contract that three unelected commissioners have decided they don’t like.
The minds of progressive activists must be running wild with ideas of what they could do if this approach is allowed to stand. Don’t like the pay gap between executives and nonexecutives? The FTC could simply declare it unfair and regulate it. Think that businesses above a certain size shouldn’t be allowed to get any bigger through mergers? The FTC could simply declare those businesses can’t make acquisitions.
Sound far-fetched? Like the banning of noncompetes, both of these policies have been put forward by Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
This fight is about much more than the fate of noncompete agreements. That’s why the Chamber of Commerce will fight in court to hold the FTC accountable to the rule of law.
Ms. Clark is president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
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second
https://www.aier.org/article/the-power-to-regulate-is-the-power-to-control/
The Power to Regulate Is the Power to Control
Robert E. WrightRobert E. Wright
– January 19, 2023Reading Time: 4 minutes
In his 1819 opinion in McCulloch v. Maryland, US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall famously stated what everyone already knew, “the power to tax is the power to destroy.” Americans also knew that the power to regulate imposes costs too, so it is akin to the power to tax. And they are now relearning a lesson they should have never forgotten, that the power to tax or to regulate is also the power to control, not just in the supposed “public interest” but in the interest of the regulators themselves, or specific politicians, or the government more generally.
Once, companies could fight government mandates and win. Perhaps most infamously, during World War II, the Western Cartridge Company of East Alton, Illinois, successfully fended off the integration order of FDR’s Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC), largely because white workers were willing to strike over the matter at a time when their output was desperately needed for the war effort.
By the 1930s’ New Deal, however, the US government regulated some industries enough to be able to control their managerial decision-making. Radio was perhaps the most important of those heavily controlled industries. Established in June 1934, early in FDR’s first term as POTUS, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) licensed radio spectrum a mere six months at a time. That gave it the power to harass radio stations that criticized the New Deal, or FDR himself. The FCC soon developed a reputation for denying licenses or causing major paperwork headaches for radio stations daft enough to question the New Deal Order or the administration’s official narratives.
One particularly stunning example of government censorship via corporate proxy occurred in February 1934, when the nation’s radio spectrum was still under the control of the FCC’s bureaucratic precursor, the Federal Radio Commission. Like more recent censorship-by-proxy, it led to death and destruction.
Eager to further his version of a Great Reset, FDR announced that contracts with private airlines to deliver the public mails were abrogated (as gold clauses in bonds had been) and the routes turned over to the US Army Air Corps. Unfortunately, the military’s pilots back then were far from being candidates for Top Gun school. As predicted, they began crashing. Soon, a dozen had died, along with many of the messages they had been entrusted to carry.
To hide his failed policy, FDR censored veteran pilot Eddie Rickenbacker, who took to the airwaves to bring public attention to the matter. NBC Radio’s William B. Miller warned Eddie that if he said anything controversial on air, he would be pulled off, on orders from Washington. Instead of criticizing FDR as intended, Eddie dissembled.
The Twitter Files saga proves that the US federal government is still using its regulatory powers to coerce corporations into censoring critics, despite the fact that doing so is patently unconstitutional. As the US Supreme Court ruled in 1960 in Bates v. City of Little Rock (361 US 516), First Amendment rights “are protected not only against heavy-handed frontal attack, but also from being stifled by more subtle governmental interference.”
The problem of indirect government censorship on the internet, though, has been brewing for decades. In 2006, University of Pennsylvania law professor Seth F. Kreimer warned in a law review article of “censorship by proxy” and noted that the government was looking for the “weakest link” in the digital supply chain between unwanted content providers and their audiences. His article reveals that most early efforts at censorship by corporate proxy by Western governments focused on bad guys, like pedophiliac Nazis, whom nobody wanted to defend. The problem was that the tools they developed were scalable and ready to use against anyone, even someone like Rickenbacker.
The subsequent emergence of a few social media megasites like Facebook, Tik Tok, Twitter, and YouTube created the weak links that the government wanted. Their corporate owners are huge, and hence have much to protect from incursions by the IRS, the FBI, the FCC, the DOJ, and perhaps even the most potent regulator of all, the National Archives and Records Administration.
Social media corporations likely calculated that being willing minions of the Leviathan would not hurt their bottom lines, and could perhaps even augment them. Small users who might pose a risk can be easily ejected without discernibly hurting revenues. Tossing many small users might start to add up, though, especially if they were kicked off for reasons that could be applied to larger accounts, too. Why social media corporations did not hire fancy lawyers to protect themselves from losing “whales” remains unclear, but it is possible that the government played the dirty old trick of hiring all the best ones in town.
There was also the risk that users would flee platforms that developed reputations for censoring legal and highly sought after content, especially if close substitutes were available. Indeed, when it became apparent that something untoward was happening on the big social media platforms, competing entrepreneurs established new ones allegedly immune, or at least less susceptible, to government censorship. The new social media platforms attracted users and hence took some market share away from the big incumbents, but none have been breakout successes. Some may be engaging in the same types of censorship recently exposed at Twitter, while others, most infamously the microblogging site Parler, proved susceptible to attacks on their links to the internet, including app downloading services.
The “chilling effect” of government censorship by corporate proxy has Americans on an icy slope that bottoms out in the sort of political slavery feared by the Founders and Framers. The slope thankfully has been a long one, with some flatter areas, and the Constitution via SCOTUS has thrown us safety lines, but we may be picking up speed. Moreover, one of the most robust of those safety lines, the First Amendment, has been stretched to the breaking point.
Robert E. Wright is a Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. He is the (co)author or (co)editor of over two dozen major books, book series, and edited collections, including AIER’s The Best of Thomas Paine (2021) and Financial Exclusion (2019). He has also (co)authored numerous articles for important journals, including the American Economic Review, Business History Review, Independent Review, Journal of Private Enterprise, Review of Finance, and Southern Economic Review. Robert has taught business, economics, and policy courses at Augustana University, NYU’s Stern School of Business, Temple University, the University of Virginia, and elsewhere since taking his Ph.D. in History from SUNY Buffalo in 1997.
Selected Publications
Reducing Recidivism and Encouraging Desistance: A Social Entrepreneurial Approach of Journal of Entrepreneurship and Public Policy (Summer 2022).
“The Political Economy of Modern Wildlife Management: How Commercialization Could Reduce Game Overabundance.” Independent Review (Spring 2022).
“Sowing the Seeds of a Future Crisis: The SEC and the Emergence of the Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organization (NRSRO) Category, 1971-75.” Co-authored with Andrew Smith. Business History Review (Winter 2021).
“AI ≠ UBI Income Portfolio Adjustment to Technological Transformation.” Co-authored with Aleksandra Przegalinska. Frontiers in Human Dynamics: Social Networks (2021).
“Liberty Befits All: Stowe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Independent Review (Winter 2020).
“Pioneer Financial News National Broadcast Journalist Wilma Soss, NBC Radio, 1954-1980.” Journalism History (Fall 2018).
“Devolution of the Republican Model of Anglo-American Corporate Governance.” Advances in Financial Economics (2015).
“The Pivotal Role of Private Enterprise in America’s Transportation Age, 1790-1860.” Journal of Private Enterprise (Spring 2014)
“Corporate Insurers in Antebellum America.” Co-authored with Christopher Kingston. Business History Review (Autumn 2012).
“The Deadliest of Games: The Institution of Dueling.” Co-authored with Christopher Kingston. Southern Economic Journal (April 2010).
“Alexander Hamilton, Central Banker: Crisis Management During the U.S. Financial Panic of 1792.” Co-authored with Richard E. Sylla and David J. Cowen. Business History Review (Spring 2009).
“Integration of Trans-Atlantic Capital Markets, 1790-1845.” Co-authored with Richard Sylla and Jack Wilson. Review of Finance (December 2006), 613-44.
“State ‘Currencies’ and the Transition to the U.S. Dollar: Clarifying Some Confusions.” Co-authored with Ron Michener. American Economic Review (June 2005).
“Reforming the U.S. IPO Market: Lessons from History and Theory,” Accounting, Business, and Financial History (November 2002).
“Bank Ownership and Lending Patterns in New York and Pennsylvania, 1781-1831.” Business History Review (Spring 1999).
Find Robert
SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=362640
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3792-3506
Academia: https://robertwright.academia.edu/
Google: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=D9Qsx6QAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra
Twitter, Gettr, and Parler: @robertewright
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https://dailycaller.com/2023/02/01/gas-efficiency-law-ban/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=rundown&pnespid=sKVqFHlcKKAUy.Se_zu3Fp_P4Qy0VsB_POa1mfl4oB5mqpiNLi1ilg12CQYFAtuPkIV65.YA
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/02/authors-of-the-law-biden-used-to-wipe-out-student-debt-declare-he-doesnt-have-the-authority/?bypass_key=QzBNT2hmYUk5THNOdG91QTVROVAwdz09OjpaMDVDZG5SQ1VXdDVTbE5aUkdKdmExcHVVVWhOUVQwOQ%3D%3D?utm_source%3Demail&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=30449741&utm_source=Sailthru
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surely diversity equity and climate change are paramount considerations:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/local-reactions/
cost : whatever .....
something very Leftist/ Democrat party going on here
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Remember when the left hated the FBI?
Good times, good times
surely diversity equity and climate change are paramount considerations:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/local-reactions/
cost : whatever .....
something very Leftist/ Democrat party going on here
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Banning Gas Stoves by Regulation
New Energy Department rules would eliminate most current models.
By The Editorial BoardFollow
Feb. 3, 2023 5:57 pm ET
When progressives can’t pass their agenda through the front door in Congress, they sneak it through a regulatory back window. That’s what the Biden Administration is doing with gas stoves, as the Energy Department this week proposed new rules that amount to a gradual de facto ban.
A Biden appointee on the Consumer Product Safety Commission ignited a firestorm last month by threatening to ban gas stoves. After criticism from West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and others, the CPSC chairman rejected the idea, and White House officials said they didn’t support banning gas stoves.
Then why has the Energy Department proposed new efficiency standards that would ban the sale of most gas stoves currently on the market? The stated purpose of the rule-making is to reduce energy consumption and save consumers money. But these benefits are meager. The department estimates the proposed rule would reduce energy use by a mere 3.4% from the status quo, and consumers on average would save $21.89 over a cook-top’s lifetime.
Even this assumes the standards are technically achievable without compromising performance. A spokesperson for the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers tells us that gas cook-tops would have to be completely redesigned to comply. Burners might have to become smaller and heavy grate designs altered, which would increase cooking times.
Twenty of the 21 gas stove-top models that the Energy Department tested wouldn’t comply with its proposed standards. Manufacturers would have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars redesigning stoves, if they bother.
Those costs would be passed to consumers in higher prices. The Energy Department estimates increased appliance prices will be offset by lower energy bills as well as climate and health benefits. But these benefits are speculative while higher product costs and reduced performance will directly harm consumers.
Making appliances more energy efficient involves trade-offs. Consumers and manufacturers may choose to make them, but they shouldn’t be forced. Recall how federal energy-efficiency standards reduced the performance of dishwashers. Machines that once washed and dried dishes in an hour now take two to three, and often still don’t get the job done.
Biden officials claim the proposed gas efficiency standards are feasible. But that’s what they also say about their stringent fuel-economy mandates, which effectively force manufacturers to produce more electric vehicles. In both cases the Administration is using regulation to impose policies and coerce behavior they can’t get Congress to endorse.
The new rules betray that the Administration is trying to eliminate gas stoves by whatever regulatory means possible. The Biden CPSC was preparing to use the Federal Hazardous Substances Act as a pretext to ban them before the public uproar. Richard Trumka Jr.—the commissioner who floated the ban last month—claimed that emissions from gas stoves are a “hidden hazard.” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm flogged a dubious study claiming that 12.7% of childhood asthma cases in the U.S. are attributable to gas stoves.
The Inflation Reduction Act also includes a $840 rebate to buy electric stoves plus $500 to convert from gas. Yes, Americans, they really are coming for your gas stoves.
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We Met at the Bar
Having already downed a few power drinks, she turns around, faces him, looks him straight in the eye and says, "Listen here, good looking. I will screw anybody, anytime, anywhere, their place, my place, in the car, front door, back door, on the ground, standing up, sitting down, naked or with clothes on...It doesn't matter to me. I just love it."
His eyes now wide with interest, he responds, "No kidding... I'm in Government too. Are you federal or state?
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Gina Raimondo, Social Policy Planner
Her effort to defend the strings on Chips Act funding is hilarious.
By The Editorial BoardFollow
March 28, 2023 6:55 pm ET
WSJ
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo has one heck of a deadpan. Semiconductor companies that want federal funds under the Chips Act are being told to follow mandates from the Biden Administration on everything from child care to union pay for construction workers. Ms. Raimondo is insisting with a straight face that this is only about helping chip makers be successful.
“There is zero ‘social policy’ that we’re trying to achieve here,” she told the Journal in an interview. “We want them to show us a workforce plan, including how they think about child care, not because we have a social agenda but because we know [that] they’re struggling to hire workers.” You’re trying too hard, Madam Secretary.
When the Commerce Department began rolling out the rules in February, news reports noted President Biden’s grand ambitions to subsidize child care. Once it became clear those ideas would fail on Capitol Hill, as the New York Times reported, “Ms. Raimondo gathered aides around a conference table. She told them, she said, that ‘if Congress wasn’t going to do what they should have done, we’re going to do it in implementation’ of the bills that did pass.”
The rules are even framed in a way that puts social policy at the top. “Child care is critical to expanding employment opportunity for economically disadvantaged individuals, including economically disadvantaged women,” reads one of the notices from Ms. Raimondo’s bureaucracy. “The Department requires that any applicant requesting CHIPS Direct Funding over $150 million provide a plan for access to child care for facility and construction workers.”
Ms. Raimondo is not really so daft as to think private companies can’t handle their workforces without the feds ordering them to offer certain benefits in their own interest. But telling the truth won’t get her a promotion to Treasury Secretary.
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A Biden Bait-and-Switch on Electric Vehicles
As Joe Manchin feared, Treasury is rewriting the Inflation Reduction Act’s green subsidy limits.
By The Editorial BoardFollow
March 31, 2023 6:37 pm ET
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Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., asks questions during a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government hearing to examine proposed budget estimates and justification for the 2024 fiscal year at the Capitol in Washington on Wednesday, March 22, 2023. (AP Photo/Amanda Andrade-Rhoades)
PHOTO: AMANDA ANDRADE-RHOADES/ASSOCIATED PRESS
We interrupt the latest Donald Trump melodrama for a word from Biden Administration regulators. While the world isn’t watching, and certainly the press corps isn’t, regulators on Friday announced they are essentially rewriting last year’s Inflation Reduction Act so more electric vehicles will qualify for subsidies.
In return for his vote, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin insisted on numerous conditions for the IRA’s $7,500 EV tax credit. He wanted to encourage more U.S. manufacturing and ensure subsidies don’t go to the affluent. The law imposed an income limit to qualify for subsidies of $150,000 for individual EV buyers, as well as a price cap for vans, SUVs and pickups ($80,000), and sedans ($55,000).
To qualify for $3,750 of the credit, an increasing share of a vehicle’s battery minerals such as lithium and nickel also had be extracted or processed in the U.S. or in a country with which the U.S. has a free-trade agreement. The other half of the credit was supposed to be available only for vehicles in which a majority of its battery components are made in North America, starting at 50% this year and up to 100% by 2029.
Few cars currently on the market were expected to qualify for even half of the credit. Most minerals are mined and processed in countries with which we don’t have trade agreements, such as China, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Key battery components—namely, active anode and cathode materials—are mostly produced in China, Japan and South Korea.
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The Treasury Department’s proposed rules for the tax credit drive a big-rig through Mr. Manchin’s conditions. EVs leased to consumers will be able to qualify for a separate commercial vehicle tax credit, which doesn’t entail sourcing, income or price restrictions. Dealers or auto finance companies could pocket the tax credits or pass them onto customers.
Treasury is also redefining “free trade agreements” to include one-off deals with countries that commit not to impose trade barriers on critical minerals. The White House struck such a deal with Japan this week and is negotiating deals with Europe to allay its leaders’ anger over the subsidy conditions.
Anode and cathode materials in batteries would also be treated as critical minerals rather than components. Treasury’s expansive definition of trade deals and battery components will enable more vehicles to qualify for both halves of the credit and all but blow up Mr. Manchin’s sourcing conditions. No wonder the Senator is angry.
“It is horrific that the Administration continues to ignore the purpose of the law which is to bring manufacturing back to America and ensure we have reliable and secure supply chains,” he said Friday. “It is a pathetic excuse to spend more taxpayer dollars as quickly as possible and further cedes control to the Chinese Communist Party in the process.”
This rewrite of the rules means that the real cost of the climate and energy subsidies in the IRA will be far more than the $391 billion that Democrats claimed when they passed the bill. Goldman Sachs estimated recently that the cost could be $1.2 trillion over 10 years.
Unions and progressives are also angry about the Administration’s one-off mineral trade agreements, which aren’t being submitted to Congress and don’t include stringent environmental and labor rules. Public Citizen, the leftwing lobby, warned that “dangerous, dirty mining corporations that violate human rights” could “‘launder’ their minerals in Japan before shipping to the United States.”
What did they expect? The Administration has made climate its paramount priority and knows fewer consumers will buy EVs without subsidies. The public can comment on the proposed rule for 60 days, and Mr. Manchin said his comment “is simple: stop this now—just follow the law.” We wish him luck, but don’t expect Team Biden to listen. They got what they wanted when the bill passed last year.
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/irs-chief-reveals-hiring-plan-for-armed-agents_5178600.html?utm_source=News&src_src=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2023-04-08-2&src_cmp=breaking-2023-04-08-2&utm_medium=email&est=E9Caxb181yKZwMRmje7RsO57oWjIKNuz44g7zihsHn8k4v06Ss1NQTt%2FNkUoCPZ2uuo0
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https://theworthyhouse.com/2021/02/23/on-the-brawndo-tyranny/
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/apr/11/big-government-getting-bigger-joe-biden-plots-mass/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=evening&utm_term=evening&utm_content=evening&bt_ee=LeygLpLkAaNeO4Ool9CkpzNpUL07mOMyJVhlRirVL9TcmCED2WOGhgyZxO0BWIDX&bt_ts=1681246830024
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https://dailycaller.com/2023/04/12/federal-court-blocks-biden-wotus-rule/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking&pnespid=sbtqFzoaZL4d2.TJqTO0FcuK5Q_gUpBzdPOs3bY38AZmbZv3iZOowOPh_7FkD53EdSvbojTk
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IMHO this is a significant ruling. It is very good news.
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Supreme Court Rules Against Biden Administration in Agency Lawsuit Dispute
By Matthew Vadum
April 14, 2023Updated: April 14, 2023
ET
A Supreme Court ruling on April 14 made it easier to challenge the reach of two powerful federal agencies—the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
In its new red tape-cutting decision that is a defeat for the Biden administration, the Supreme Court took steps to rein in the so-called administrative state and reaffirm the separation of powers doctrine that prevents any specific branch of the government from exercising the core functions of another. The idea behind the doctrine is to discourage the concentration of power and make sure there are checks and balances.
Critics of the administrative state claim that in-house adjudications carried out by agencies are unfair because the tribunals, unlike regular courts, lack fixed evidentiary rules, allowing the agencies to function as prosecutor, judge, and jury. They argue that the tribunals are unconstitutional because they are not politically accountable.
The litigants challenging the agencies argued they should be able to contest the way the tribunals are constituted in federal courts without first having to launch a lengthy, expensive challenge within the administrative system.
But the Biden administration argued that challengers may only proceed to court after losing in potentially expensive, protracted agency proceedings.
The new ruling encompasses two cases: Axon Enterprise Inc. v. FTC, court file 21-86, and SEC v. Cochran, court file 21-1239.
Scottsdale, Arizona-based Axon makes body cameras and digital evidence management systems for law enforcement.
Axon purchased an insolvent competitor, Vievu LLC, for around $13 million in 2018. A month later the FTC sent Axon a letter indicating the acquisition raised antitrust concerns. Axon claimed it was subjected to “extensive and expensive investigatory proceedings,” and after 18 months of this “with no end in sight, Axon offered to walk away from its acquisition entirely,” but this did not satisfy the FTC.
Axon offered to unload its Vievu assets and provide millions of dollars in working capital to “a divestiture buyer,” but instead the FTC demanded that Axon transform Vievu “into a ‘clone’ of Axon using Axon’s intellectual property,” and threatened Axon with “an administrative proceeding” if it failed to do so.
Michelle Cochran is a certified public accountant in Texas.
In 2016, the SEC brought an enforcement action against Cochran, claiming she violated the Exchange Act by failing to comply with auditing standards issued by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board when performing quarterly reviews and annual audits between 2010 and 2013.
An SEC administrative law judge (ALJ) fined Cochran $22,500 and banned her from practicing before the SEC for 5 years. Cochran objected but before the agency could rule on her objection, the Supreme Court held in Lucia v. SEC (2018) that SEC ALJs are officers of the United States under the Constitution’s Appointments Clause, who must be appointed by the president, a court of law, or a department head.
Cochran’s case was reassigned to a new ALJ. Cochran sued in federal court to halt the SEC’s administrative enforcement proceedings against her, arguing that because the agency’s ALJs enjoy multiple layers of for-cause removal protection, they are unconstitutionally insulated from the president’s power to fire federal officials. She also argued that the SEC violated her due process rights by failing to follow its own rules and procedures.
On April 14, the Supreme Court ruled (pdf) unanimously against the agencies. The court’s opinion was written by Justice Elena Kagan. Justice Neil Gorsuch did not join the court’s opinion; instead, he concurred in the judgment of the court but filed a separate opinion explaining his reasons for supporting the end result.
Kagan noted that both Axon and Cochran challenged the constitutional authority of federal agencies, claiming that ALJs are “insufficiently accountable to the President, in violation of separation-of-powers principles.”
The challenges are “fundamental, even existential,” as the litigants argue that “the agencies, as currently structured, are unconstitutional in much of their work.” The function of the court here is not to resolve those challenges but “to decide where they may be heard,” the justice wrote.
Objections to agency decisions follow a prescribed procedure laid out in statute. A party first makes a claim before the agency and then, if needed, to a federal court of appeals, she wrote.
But here Axon and Cochran “sidestepped that review scheme” and went to federal district court to halt the administrative proceedings.
Kagan said the district courts have jurisdiction to hear the legal challenges.
“The ordinary statutory review scheme does not preclude a district court from entertaining these extraordinary claims,” she wrote.
The court reversed the decisions of the two federal courts of appeal involved and remanded the cases for “further proceedings consistent with this opinion.”
The Epoch Times reached out to Axon attorney Paul Clement and the U.S. Department of Justice, which represents the two agencies, for comment, but had not received a reply from either as of press time.
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Gas Stoves Triumph Over Berkeley
A federal appeals panel overrules the California city’s ban on natural gas hookups.
By The Editorial BoardFollow
April 17, 2023 6:43 pm ET
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PHOTO: SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday delivered a setback to the progressive war on gas stoves by holding that federal law pre-empts local bans. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, take note.
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Berkeley, Calif., in 2019 became the first city to prohibit natural gas connections in new buildings. San Jose, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle and others have followed. Ms. Hochul has proposed a statewide ban on gas hookups in new small buildings in 2025 and larger ones in 2028.
Not so fast. The California Restaurant Association challenged Berkeley’s ban in federal court, arguing that the Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA) pre-empts local regulation of gas appliances. A lower-court judge disagreed but was overruled Monday by a three-judge Ninth Circuit panel.
Judge Patrick Bumatay explains for the panel that the EPCA explicitly prohibits states and localities from regulating “energy efficiency, energy use or water use” once a federal energy conservation standard becomes effective for a “covered product.” The law’s federal pre-emption sweeps broadly and covers local regulations “concerning” gas appliances.
Berkeley argued that the law only pre-empts local standards dictating the design and manufacture of appliances—not regulations that affect the distribution of energy sources such as natural gas. The Biden Administration essentially agreed in an amicus brief.
But as Judge Bumatay points out, federal law defines “energy use” as “the quantity of energy directly consumed by a consumer product at point of use” by appliances, and Berkeley’s ban on new gas hookups “necessarily impacts” the quantity of gas used.
“By its plain text and structure, EPCA’s preemption provision encompasses building codes that regulate natural gas use by covered products. And by preventing such appliances from using natural gas, the new Berkeley building code does exactly that,” he wrote. “States and localities can’t skirt the text of broad preemption provisions by doing indirectly what Congress says they can’t do directly.”
Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain noted in a concurring opinion that the judiciary’s federal pre-emption doctrine is “troubling and confused” and merits more clarity from the Supreme Court. Fair enough. But as usual, progressives are seeking to advance their anti-fossil fuel agenda through a legal back door when they can’t get it through Congress.
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https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/apr/21/supreme-court-takes-administrative-state-and-power/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=subscriber&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=newsalert&utm_term=newsalert&bt_ee=ipz4kIWSR8dR1gXVA%2BzSzr4B7P7X0gRSSQ9rlVa1EyOk87VOP0UTwLvZH2sLJTsX&bt_ts=1682123096442
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/supreme-court-agrees-to-hear-case-that-could-spell-the-end-of-judicial-deference-to-federal-agencies/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=31335791
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https://www.zerohedge.com/political/pennsylvania-amish-kept-true-their-traditions-then-government-came
Let’s see, the feral government can tuck around at the border of a nuclear power 6000 miles away, but can’t be bothered to protect actual Americans on American soil by maintaining a border as required by the constitution, but hey let’s fluke with the Amish.
Why not?
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https://dailycaller.com/2023/05/10/manchin-block-biden-nominees-epa/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking&pnespid=rbdkDT1fNagY2evJqjKvCpmP7x60WcN6L.nlzfpjv0ZmQFe2V1JmbWjU8Blm4SfkpceCahNs
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https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/137/976/168/original/682907683a1fa71f.jpg
(https://media.gab.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=852,quality=100,fit=scale-down/system/media_attachments/files/137/976/168/original/682907683a1fa71f.jpg)
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She may be cute, but the thought is defeatist. It surely it will be true if we quit as the Goolag, the Pravdas (and our GM? haha) would have us do. A shot not fired is always a miss.
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She may be cute, but the thought is defeatist. It surely it will be true if we quit as the Goolag, the Pravdas (and our GM? haha) would have us do. A shot not fired is always a miss.
A realistic assessment of one’s situation is essential. Delusional optimism is exactly how you get defeated.
Sear the quote below in your brain. Make it your mantra.
You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end – which you can never afford to lose – with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
James Stockdale
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You preach to the choir with this :-D
Do appreciate that on the big picture the four of us are in harmony.
As David Gordon would say, and as I often riff now here and elsewhere "Prepare to have (y)our assumptions shattered!"
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/supreme-court-rules-against-epa-in-major-wetlands-case_5290344.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&src_src=Morningbrief&utm_campaign=mb-2023-05-26&src_cmp=mb-2023-05-26&utm_medium=email&est=PM62UKG2MeYQ4m4MEm3PyapUSim9jOB75C7Ckh7xnCGlYN%2Fb3jrZ2C1jXDNWMSrSP855
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2024 Presidential Candidates Against the Administrative State
Trump, DeSantis and even Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recognize the need to reassert political control.
By James Bacon
May 31, 2023 12:35 pm ET
The emerging question of the 2024 presidential election: Who will slay the federal leviathan? The beast goes by another name—the administrative state—and primary contenders are increasingly placing it front and center in their campaigns.
In his Twitter Spaces launch with Elon Musk, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis promised to “reconstitutionalize the executive branch and bring the administrative state to heel.” Democratic candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. began his White House bid by saying he’d “take the CIA and shatter it into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” Businessman Vivek Ramaswamy has a bold proposal to eliminate all civil-service protections for federal employees. And in Donald Trump’s first speeches of the 2024 cycle, he claimed he is better positioned than his opponents to “root out the deep state” in 2025, having learned from his personnel mistakes during his first term.
What was once obscure has become obvious: Presidents today exercise a fraction of the executive-agency control that Franklin D. Roosevelt did when he and Congress created our modern government. The Covid lockdowns encouraged by Anthony Fauci and the recently uncovered coordination between the government and social-media platforms to censor what they arbitrarily deemed “misinformation” are fresh on everyone’s mind. That these bureaucrats pursued their own agenda while Mr. Trump ostensibly had control over them proves that until you fix the administrative state, there’s no guarantee that executive-branch policy will reflect the president’s views.
The problem is that few politicians on the right have more than a surface-level understanding of this issue. Nearly all the scholarship on the administrative state has been done by left-wing academics for left-wing purposes. Most appointees who have served in Republican administrations have been content to get along with the administrative state—tinkering on the margins of policy without trying to change the system. Their dearth of knowledge has led to reform proposals that are often vague, unfeasible and half-baked.
In the modern era, only two teams have attempted to curb the administrative state’s power: Ronald Reagan’s Office of Personnel Management, led by Donald Devine, and Mr. Trump’s Office of Presidential Personnel, led by John McEntee. Both men installed political loyalists among the presidents’ appointees and took major steps to curtail career bureaucrats’ power. Mr. Devine used reduction-in-force exercises—government-speak for layoffs—when employees’ work wasn’t up to snuff. Mr. McEntee began eliminating civil-service protections for policy-making bureaucrats, among other measures. Both men moved the bureaucracy’s culture in the right direction, but because of limited time in office they weren’t able to finish the structural reforms for lasting changes.
The only way the next president can solve the problem for good is to assemble the right team from the beginning. It is necessary but insufficient to fill the executive branch’s roughly 4,000 political positions with appointees committed to the president’s agenda. He needs a White House made up of people with firsthand knowledge of how bureaucratic politics operate and the will to use that knowledge for a system overhaul. It isn’t enough to have competent conservatives. As president you need people who can outsmart the bureaucrats by devising unconventional ways around the obstacles they’ll erect.
There are things these operatives need to know. The first is which positions are critical choke points and which are mostly ceremonial. One must recognize when an agency is a lost cause that should be gutted vs. when it should be restaffed. One must also know which positions require a subject-matter expert vs. a politically aligned appointee who may lack expertise.
Staff must be well-versed in the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, which can be used to rein in bureaucracy without congressional action. It’s also essential to know how to restructure the management of the White House, which has become its own sprawling bureaucracy of career officials.
In his presidential announcement speech, Mr. Kennedy explained that the joke in Washington is that political appointees are expected to go through the motions—not make waves—and sign off on whatever policy the civil servants produce. His response was straightforward: “I get the joke, but I don’t think it’s funny.”
The next president needs to embrace that mindset and the people who share it.
Mr. Bacon is a senior adviser to the Heritage Foundation’s Presidential Transition Project. He served as White House director of operations for presidential personnel, 2020-21.
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Supreme Court Strikes Down Biden’s Student-Loan-Forgiveness Order
President Biden (left) and a protester stands in front of the Supreme Court building (right).(Kevin Lamarque, Nathan Howard/Reuters)
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By JEFF ZYMERI
June 30, 2023 10:46 AM
The Supreme Court on Friday struck down President Biden’s student-loan-forgiveness program, finding that the statute the administration relied on in issuing the executive order does not give the secretary of education sweeping authority to forgive billions in student loans for tens of millions of Americans.
In the first of two cases the Court ruled unanimously that the individual plaintiffs lacked the standing to sue because they failed to establish harm. But in the second case, the Court ruled 6-3 that the state of Missouri had standing to sue and convincingly argued that President Biden lacked the authority to forgive student loans for entire categories of borrowers under the HEROES Act.
The Court’s precedent “requires that Congress speak clearly before a department secretary can unilaterally alter large sections of the American economy,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority.
“The Secretary asserts that the HEROES Act grants him the authority to cancel $430 billion of student loan principal. It does not,” Roberts goes on to write. “We hold today that the Act allows the Secretary to ‘waive or modify’ existing statutory or regulatory provisions applicable to financial assistance programs under the Education Act, not to rewrite that statute from the ground up.”
Roberts went on to cite a statement made by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), who in 2021 insisted that President Biden could not exercise executive authority in the name of “debt forgiveness,” to bolster the majority opinion.
“People think that the President of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not. He can postpone. He can delay. But he does not have that power. That has to be an act of Congress,” the California Democrat said during a press conference in July 2021.
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Writing for the dissent, Justice Elena Kagan argued that the Supreme Court had dramatically overstepped in its ruling. “In every respect, the Court today exceeds its proper, limited role in our Nation’s governance.”
“From the first page to the last, today’s opinion departs from the demands of judicial restraint. At the behest of a party that has suffered no injury, the majority decides a contested public policy issue properly belonging to the politically accountable branches and the people they represent,” Kagan added in her concluding remarks.
She was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Kentanji Brown Jackson.
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In August of last year, the Biden administration announced an executive order that would cancel up to $20,000 in federal student-loan debt for those making less than $125,000 in income per year. The administration invoked the HEROES Act to justify the plan. It was the same statute that was invoked by former president Donald Trump’s education secretary, Betsey DeVos, to pause student-loan payments as well as the accrual of interest early in the pandemic.
The Biden administration has argued that the Education Department under Miguel Cardona acted within the bounds of the statute, which was passed in the wake of the September 11 attacks to ensure that Americans would not be financially worse off after their military service. The challengers have claimed that Congress did not give the executive branch the power to enact such a major debt-relief program, costing over $400 billion, and that there is little evidence that all recipients of student loans are in a worse financial position due to the pandemic.
The Supreme Court heard the two challenges in February. The program was challenged by a group of Republican states that argued that the cancellation exceeds the Department’s authority and was arbitrary and capricious, as more incremental relief was not considered. It was also challenged by two individuals — Myra Brown and Alexander Taylor. Brown was not eligible for relief because she held commercial loans and Taylor was not eligible for the full $20,000 because he was not a Pell Grant recipient. Had they been allowed to, Brown and Taylor would have submitted comments arguing for a more expansive plan. The Court found that Brown and Taylor lacked the standing to sue.
Whether the challengers had standing to sue was an important point of contention in both cases. In the former case, the six states lost on standing in district court. The Biden administration argued that the injury to the states was too speculative. In the latter case, the administration said the asserted injury is a complete mismatch to the relief sought: Brown and Taylor claim to want a more expansive plan, but also argue the HEROES Act doesn’t authorize the plan.
The Covid-19 pandemic ended in May and the Biden administration announced student-loan payments would resume after the summer, later codified in the debt-ceiling deal. The Department of Education confirmed that interest would start accruing in September and payments would resume in October.
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https://dailycaller.com/2023/07/08/gop-lawmakers-introduce-bills-to-disarm-federal-bureaucrats/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=29912&pnespid=rKg6FihKJfIYxOHCvzPrGJ_IvRLyS8NtLrGnmeVprxhmukHAgzEzp1Cmrnv3GYuyyIVfaGJK
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/ted-cruz-lays-out-road-map-for-next-big-conservative-supreme-court-battle/?bypass_key=L1BaN3JIRzRNU1JsaXFoWDRraVo1Zz09OjpURTExVjNkR2RubHRXR2x0VkhNM1QyVmtkV3REUVQwOQ%3D%3D?utm_source%3Demail&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=32048055&utm_source=Sailthru
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https://www.nationalreview.com/news/irs-to-end-most-unannounced-home-visits-reversing-decades-long-practice-after-alleged-abuses/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=breaking&utm_campaign=newstrack&utm_term=32175938
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https://constitutioncenter.org/blog...l-agencies-with-their-supreme-court-challenge
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The EPA Defies the Supreme Court
The agency imposes a ‘suite’ of climate policies and doesn’t even try to hide its own lawlessness.
By Chris Horner
Aug. 17, 2023 6:41 pm ET
In politics, inadvertently telling the truth is called a “gaffe.” Last year Michael Regan, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, made a remark in passing that gave away the Biden administration’s plans for enforcing its climate agenda through a “suite of rules” imposed under programs lacking any credible connection to climate. A few months later, a Supreme Court opinion transformed Mr. Regan’s indiscretion into justification for wholesale judicial repudiation of the Biden administration’s climate regulatory blitz.
Mr. Regan’s comment came on March 10, 2022, when he addressed the press following his keynote address to CERAWeek, a climate conference in Houston. A reporter asked about vulnerabilities of the EPA’s approach to installing climate regulation through the Obama-Biden Clean Power Plan, which was then awaiting judgment by the court. Mr. Regan replied that the agency had abandoned the idea of relying on any specific grant of regulatory authority. Instead it was in the process of tightening rules under numerous and varied regulatory programs all at once, pressuring disfavored operations to close and compelling investment consistent with the EPA’s desires.
Mr. Regan went on to cite rules to tighten regulation of mercury, ozone, soot, hazardous air pollutants, water effluent and coal ash under acknowledged congressional grants of authority. But he also called the “expedited retirement” of power plants “the best tool for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions” and opined that the “industry gets to take a look at this suite of rules all at once and say, ‘Is it worth doubling down on investments in this current facility or operation, or should we look at the cost and say no, it’s time to pivot and invest in a clean-energy future?’ ”
This already reflected something of a scofflaw position. Congress never approved what Mr. Regan described. It became a serious problem when the justices struck down the Clean Power Plan in June. West Virginia v. EPA held that the agency didn’t have the authority it claimed to force power-plant closures by setting unmeetable emission standards and thus dictate, as the court had put it, “how Americans get their energy.”
Chief Justice John Roberts noted for the 6-3 majority that after Congress had repeatedly considered and rejected providing the agency authority to regulate power-sector greenhouse gases, the EPA claimed “to discover an unheralded power” that represented a “transformative expansion in [its] regulatory authority” to force “generation shifting.”
The court invoked the major-questions doctrine—a principle grounded in the separation of powers—which states that when a regulatory agency seeks to impose burdens of “economic and political significance,” there is “reason to hesitate.” If an agency can’t point to “clear congressional authorization,” the authority doesn’t exist.
Many climate activists took the lesson that they should stop bragging about clever regulatory approaches. Two weeks after West Virginia v. EPA came out, the Environmental Law Institute hosted a funereal webinar in which panelists warned about candid outbursts turning up in Supreme Court reversals, mentioning such statements as President Obama’s “if Congress won’t act soon . . . I will,” and Mr. Biden’s then-chief of staff Ron Klain’s tweeting about “the ultimate work-around” of constitutional limits to impose Covid vaccine mandates. Several panelists urged activists to be careful in their press releases and to not let appointees’ cheerleading “get out in front of the lawyers.”
That’s good advice, but the administration appears undeterred. Records obtained by policy groups I represent in Freedom of Information Act litigation show Mr. Biden’s EPA team came in with this plan to hit fossil generation with a barrage of disparate regulations as a climate strategy. One impressively prescient email sent the day after Mr. Biden’s election by law professor and soon-to-be Biden climate advisor Ann Carlson laid out the approach, even using the phrase “suite of climate policies.”
Two weeks into Mr. Biden’s term, a PowerPoint slide show—given by a lawyer named Joe Goffman, who is hailed in media profiles as the administration’s “law whisperer” because “his specialty is teaching old laws to do new tricks”—detailed a plan of tightening regulation on power plants by using solid waste, water and even visibility standards. The audience for his plan to blitz fossil power generation with these non-climate programs? The White House Climate Office. FOIA records also include activist correspondence to Mr. Goffman specifically urging the EPA to tighten “haze” rules as a back door for the climate agenda, which EPA appears to be doing.
Long-held plans are hard to let go. Despite the court’s rejection of each authority the administration has claimed so far to regulate greenhouse gases from power plants, one email written during the immediate post-West Virginia scramble refers to “EPA’s CAA toolbox” for “Power Sector GHG Reductions.” (The abbreviations stand for Clean Air Act and greenhouse gas.)
West Virginia v. EPA addressed power the agency claimed under a specific rule, but the opinion’s scope extends far beyond that rule. The justices flatly stated that trying to force the plant-closure agenda Mr. Regan described, for which the EPA can cite no statutory mandate, presents a “major question” requiring a clear congressional statement of authority.
Academics now call on Mr. Biden to ignore the Supreme Court. His EPA is doing so, while also ignoring Congress. It seems inevitable the court will confront this latest gambit to evade constitutional limits. As always, the question will be how much lasting harm the EPA can inflict before the courts act to stop it.
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/fda-is-not-a-physician-appeals-court-sides-with-doctors-on-ivermectin-for-covid-19-post-5485494?utm_source=Morningbrief&src_src=Morningbrief&utm_campaign=mb-2023-09-07&src_cmp=mb-2023-09-07&utm_medium=email&est=OhFm%2FXlOnW0OhVw%2BqS0I7z1eBasofYMWNDm6zbZeGZan8c9Ph8%2FSbWjyTQZNGsVfeRjd
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https://amgreatness.com/2023/09/29/victor-davis-hanson-completely-clean-out-rogue-government-agencies/
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Glad to see Ramaswamy and VDH hammering this issue.
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NTY
Trump Has a Master Plan for Destroying the ‘Deep State’
Nov. 27, 2023, 5:01 a.m. ET
By Donald P. Moynihan
Mr. Moynihan is a professor of public policy at Georgetown and an expert on the administrative state.
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I study government bureaucracies. This is not normally a key political issue. Right now, it is, and everyone should be paying attention.
Donald Trump, the former president and current candidate, puts it in apocalyptic terms: “Either the deep state destroys America or we destroy the deep state.” This is not an empty threat. He has a real and plausible plan to utterly transform American government. It will undermine the quality of that government and it will threaten our democracy.
A second Trump administration would be very different from the first. Mr. Trump’s blueprint for amassing power has been developed by a constellation of conservative organizations that surround him, led by the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025. This plan would elevate personal fealty to Mr. Trump as the central value in government employment, processes and institutions.
It has three major parts.
The first is to put Trump loyalists into appointment positions. Mr. Trump believed that “the resistance” to his presidency included his own appointees. Unlike in 2016, he now has a deep bench of loyalists. The Heritage Foundation and dozens of other Trump-aligned organizations are screening candidates to create 20,000 potential MAGA appointees. They will be placed in every agency across government, including the agencies responsible for protecting the environment, regulating workplace safety, collecting taxes, determining immigration policy, maintaining safety net programs, representing American interests overseas and ensuring the impartial rule of law.
These are not conservatives reluctantly serving Mr. Trump out of a sense of patriotic duty, but those enthusiastic about helping a twice-impeached president who tried to overturn the results of an election. An influx of appointees like this would come at a cost to the rest of us. Political science research that examines the effects of politicization on federal agencies shows that political appointees, especially inexperienced ones, are associated with lower performance in government and less responsiveness to the public and to Congress.
The second part of the Trump plan is to terrify career civil servants into submission. To do so, he would reimpose an executive order that he signed but never implemented at the end of his first administration. The Schedule F order would allow him to convert many of these officials into political appointees.
Schedule F would be the most profound change to the civil service system since its creation in 1883. Presidents can currently fill about 4,000 political appointment positions at the federal level. This already makes the United States an outlier among similar democracies, in terms of the degree of politicization of the government. The authors of Schedule F have suggested it would be used to turn another 50,000 officials — with deep experience of how to run every major federal program we rely on — into appointees. Other Republican presidential candidates have also pledged to use Schedule F aggressively. Ron DeSantis, for example, promised that as president he would “start slitting throats on Day 1.”
Schedule F would be a catastrophe for government performance. Merit-based government personnel systems perform better than more politicized bureaucracies. Under the first Trump administration, career officials were more likely to quit when sidelined by political appointees.
Schedule F would also damage democracy. The framers included a requirement, in the Constitution itself, that public officials swear an oath of loyalty to the Constitution, a reminder to public employees that their deepest loyalty is to something greater than whoever occupies the White House or Congress. By using Schedule F to demand personal loyalty, Mr. Trump would make it harder for them to keep that oath.
When he was president, his administration frequently targeted officials for abuse, denial of promotions or investigations for their perceived disloyalty. In a second administration, he would simply fire them. Trump loyalists reportedly have lists ready of civil servants who will be fired because they were not deemed cooperative enough during his first term.
The third part of Mr. Trump’s authoritarian blueprint is to create a legal framework that would allow him to use government resources to protect himself, attack his political enemies and force through his policy goals without congressional approval. Internal government lawyers can block illegal or unconstitutional actions. Reporters for The New York Times have uncovered a plan to place Trump loyalists in those key positions.
This is not about conservatism. Mr. Trump grew disillusioned with conservative Federalist Society lawyers, despite drawing on them to stock his judicial nominations. It is about finding lawyers willing to create a legal rationale for his authoritarian impulses. Examples from Mr. Trump’s time in office include Mark Paoletta, the former general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget, who approved Mr. Trump’s illegal withholding of aid to Ukraine. Or Jeffery Clark, who almost became Mr. Trump’s acting attorney general when his superiors refused to advance Mr. Trump’s false claims of election fraud.
Mr. Clark is now under indictment for a “criminal attempt to communicate false statements and writings” to Georgia state officials. But he continues to lay the groundwork for a second Trump term. He has made the case for the president using military forces for domestic law enforcement. He has also written a legal analysis arguing that “the U.S. Justice Department is not independent,” while Mr. Paoletta told The Times, “I believe a president doesn’t need to be so hands-off with the D.O.J.” If government lawyers will not defend norms of Justice Department independence, Mr. Trump will use the department to shield himself from legal accountability and to pursue his enemies.
We sometimes think of democracy as merely the act of voting. But the operation of government is also democracy in action, a measure of how well the social contract between the citizen and the state is being kept. When values like transparency, legality, honesty, due process, fealty to the Constitution and competence are threatened in government offices, so too is our democracy. These democratic values would be eviscerated if Mr. Trump returns to power with an army of loyalists applying novel legal theories and imposing a political code of silence on potential holdouts.
American bureaucracy is often slow and cumbersome. The civil service system in particular is in need of modernization. But it is also suffused with democratic checks that limit the abuse of centralized power. This is why Mr. Trump and his supporters are so precisely targeting the administrative state, taking advantage of an antipathy toward Washington that both parties have long nurtured. If Mr. Trump has a chance to implement his various plans, expect a weaker American government, worse public services and the dismantling of limits on presidential power.
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Strange to read that an "expert" on the "administrative state" does not know that something has gone deeply and terribly wrong with it.
Does he not know about the whole Comey, McCabe, Stzruk Page affair? The phony FISAs? IRS targeting? Vindman? The pre-dawn, guns drawn raids of Presidential advisers? He really doesn't know anything went wrong? Nor do his readers?
Worse yet, he believes these career professionals are who should really govern us, not the elected figureheads who come and go. They are better because they stay longer and acquire much more wisdom and power? Constraining the power of the deep state "will undermine the quality of that government and it will threaten our democracy."
Isn't it exactly the other way around??
He refers to the "twice-impeached president who tried to overturn the results of an election". Does he mean the twice vindicated President who tried to challenge fraud but was thwarted with "lack of standing"? Regarding the impeachments, they held a trial, you know, and the outcome was - not guilty, twice.
Heritage is a "trump-aligned" organization? He's not really an expert on organizations of the right. They were conservative before Trump bought his first property.
"Trump’s blueprint for amassing power" looks a little like the author expert never read the constitution and Supreme Court rulings that define the singular head of the "Executive Branch".
Not mentioned is that he's 77 and only eligible for one term. Hardly a threat to rule us for life (and beyond).
One of Trumps advisers, "Mr. Clark is now under indictment for a “criminal attempt to communicate false statements and writings” to Georgia state officials. But he continues to lay the groundwork for a second Trump term."
No mention of innocent until proven guilty?
"We sometimes think of democracy as merely the act of voting. But the operation of government is also democracy in action, a measure of how well the social contract between the citizen and the state is being kept."
The ability of the unelected officials to operate against the will of the elected officials and the people is a sign of a functioning democracy? On what planet?
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https://washingtontimes-dc.newsmemory.com/?token=7acc226117746df4e552f734fabde0ad_6564afca_6d25b5f&selDate=20231127
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The Supreme Court Considers the Right to Trial by Jury
SEC v. Jarkesy could vindicate a legal protection against the administrative state that the Founders fought for.
By
The Editorial Board
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Nov. 26, 2023 5:10 pm ET
The Supreme Court on Wednesday will hear the first of two landmark cases this term challenging the runaway administrative state. At stake in SEC v. Jarkesy is a bedrock constitutional principle that colonists fought to defend in the American revolution: the right to a trial by jury.
Congress in recent decades has expanded the enforcement powers of administrative agencies. The 2010 Dodd-Frank Act granted the Securities and Exchange Commission unbridled power to seek penalties administratively against any individual for violating securities laws. Democrats wanted to make it easier for the agency to punish misconduct.
Administrative tribunals let SEC prosecutors present hearsay evidence and unauthenticated documents that would be inadmissible in a traditional federal court. Defendants also enjoy fewer procedural protections including the tools of legal discovery. No surprise, then, that the SEC wins almost all cases it charges in-house. At the time of hedge-fund founder George Jarkesy’s administrative trial in 2014, the SEC had a 100% in-house victory rate versus 61% in federal court in 200 contested cases.
The SEC charged Mr. Jarkesy with securities fraud for allegedly inflating the value of fund assets, which the agency said allowed him to earn higher management fees. An administrative law judge (ALJ) ruled against Mr. Jarkesy. SEC commissioners upheld the ruling six years later, ordered him to pay a $300,000 penalty, and barred him from the industry.
Mr. Jarkesy appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that SEC tribunals violate his Seventh Amendment right to trial by jury. He also contended that multiple layers of for-cause tenure protections for ALJs from presidential removal offend the constitutional separation of powers. The Fifth Circuit ruled for Mr. Jarkesy on all counts.
In its High Court brief, the SEC argues the Seventh Amendment applies only when private—not public—rights are at stake. Earlier Court decisions have exempted claims from the right to a jury trial if they involve public rights such as government-granted benefits and privileges.
The SEC tries to muddy the public-private distinction by arguing that public rights are at stake whenever the government sues on behalf of the “public” to enforce laws. But as Mr. Jarkesy points out, the SEC is seeking to deprive him of a core right for a common-law offense that he allegedly committed against other private citizens.
The historical record supports his argument. Today’s administrative tribunals resemble those that the British government used to punish colonists and religious dissidents before the revolution. The British government used jury-less admiralty courts to impose civil penalties on colonists for violating the Sugar and Stamp Acts.
The Declaration of Independence cited the denial of “the benefits of trial by jury” as one of the colonists’ chief grievances. The Founders pushed to enshrine the right in the Constitution to prevent the new Congress from creating special forums to adjudicate civil penalties as Parliament and the King had done.
A jury trial in federal court ensures due process for defendants and protects against abuses of enforcement power. Underscoring this point, SEC enforcement staff were found in Mr. Jarkesy’s case and dozens of others to have improperly accessed privileged legal memos of agency lawyers involved in adjudicating their cases.
As for double removal protections for ALJs, the SEC says they are constitutionally permissible if deemed “best for the public interest.” But it proposes no limiting principle. ALJs can be fired only for “good cause” by a Merit Selection Review Board whose members can be removed only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” In Free Enterprise Fund (2010), the Court struck down a similar scheme that insulated members of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board with two layers of tenure protection.
Progressives say a ruling for Mr. Jarkesy would gut the administrative state, which is what they always say. But the SEC and other federal agencies could continue to litigate cases in-house that involve truly public rights such as veterans benefits and asylum claims. But they would have to go to federal court to impose civil penalties for common-law offenses.
Restoring the originalist interpretation of the Seventh Amendment would strengthen safeguards against tyrannical government.
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Add the Federal Communications Commission to the gang of Biden regulators targeting Elon Musk. On Tuesday the agency invoked dubious grounds to scrap funding for his Starlink satellite service to expand high-speed internet to rural Americans.
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Three years ago the FCC awarded Starlink $885 million to provide high-speed internet service to some 640,000 rural homes and businesses in 35 states. Several traditional broadband providers also won awards. But Starlink has the potential to cover remote regions at lower cost because it doesn’t require building out hundreds of miles of fiber.
Americans in rural areas can stick a satellite dish on their home or business that connects with Starlink’s satellites in earth’s low orbit. Starlink has more than 5,420 satellites in orbit, which provide high-speed Internet in 14 European countries, and Ukraine has used Starlink terminals to defend against the Russians.
The FCC’s new 3-2 Democratic majority on Tuesday nonetheless revoked Starlink’s funding because it hasn’t met its commitment to connect 640,000 rural Americans two years ahead of schedule. Yet the law merely requires Starlink to show it is “reasonably capable” of providing high-speed internet to at least 40% of the roughly 640,000 rural premises by the end of 2025. Starlink filed voluminous documents with the agency in 2021 and 2022 demonstrating it could reach this benchmark. The FCC has never before required that a funding recipient meet its obligations years early.
Democratic commissioners simply ignored them. They claim the company isn’t making fast enough progress, though other funding recipients aren’t any further along. The Democratic majority justifies its disparate treatment of Starlink by claiming it is relying on an unproven technology. Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky would surely disagree.
The FCC news release also claims that funding Starlink’s service “would not be the best use of limited Universal Service Fund dollars.” This is political misdirection. We wish the fund’s revenues were limited. But the FCC can raise more money by increasing charges on telecom carriers, an authority that is currently under legal challenge.
In any case, extending high-speed fiber to the rural areas that Starlink aims to serve would cost at least $3 billion, as GOP commissioner Brendan Carr notes in a dissent. The FCC’s decision “cannot be explained by any objective application of law, facts, or policy,” he writes, adding that it follows a disturbing pattern of Biden regulators targeting Mr. Musk’s businesses.
The Democrats may also be doing the bidding of the Communications Workers of America, which represents workers at traditional broadband providers. Starlink wouldn’t require large numbers of unionized workers to blanket rural areas with high-speed internet and could do so faster than traditional carriers.
It would be better policy if the government left the financing of broadband expansion to private companies. But if it’s going to pick winners and losers, it ought to do so based on objective criteria rather than political bias. The FCC’s arbitrary revocation of Starlink’s funding underscores that it is far from an “independent” agency, as Republican commissioner Nathan Simington writes in dissent.
“If this is what passes for due process and the rule of law at the FCC, then this agency ought not to be trusted with the adjudicatory powers Congress has granted it and the deference that the courts have given it,” he writes. Agency Chair Jessica Rosenworcel might ponder that as she politicizes the agency.
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Biden to Apprentices: You’re Fired
The Labor Department uses 776 pages to rewrite a two-page 1937 law, with a goal of limiting non-union worker training.
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Dec. 18, 2023 6:34 pm ET
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Want a classic example of the administrative state gone wild? Get a look at the Labor Department’s recently proposed 776-page rule that purports to clarify a two-page 1937 law regulating apprenticeship programs.
Employers across America complain about a shortage of skilled workers. DOL’s rule will make that worse by imposing onerous regulations on apprenticeships. The goal is to help labor unions and advance its policy of diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI.
The 1937 National Apprenticeship Act was intended to prevent discrimination in worker training and stop employers from using apprentices as cheap labor. The law authorized DOL to establish “labor standards necessary to safeguard the welfare of apprentices” that “bring together employers and labor” and “cooperate with State agencies.”
Apprenticeships let workers acquire skills while earning a paycheck under the supervision of skilled workers. They are a common low-cost way for employers to train workers in trade occupations such as plumbing and construction. They can also serve as a worker pipeline for newer industries such as cyber-security and green manufacturing.
About half of apprenticeship programs are jointly run by labor and management, typically governed by collective-bargaining agreements. Yet unions accuse non-union employers of using apprenticeships “to find cheap labor,” as DOL puts it. Its proposed rule aims to make it harder and more expensive for employers to use non-union apprenticeships.
The rule would require that apprenticeship programs provide at least 2,000 hours of on-the-job training, though many can train workers in less time. Employers would have to provide “accessible” and “equitable” facilities for all workers—e.g., bathrooms that correspond to gender identity—and “personal protective equipment” that fits “according to each apprentice’s size and body type.”
Companies would also have to provide apprentices with the same “allowances, rights, and protections” as regular employees, including family leave and retirement benefits. White-collar interns aren’t typically entitled to the same fringe benefits as full-time workers, so why is DOL requiring employers with blue-collar trainees to do so?
DOL’s manifest goal is to limit non-union programs that don’t result in more union jobs. The rule would let the department dissolve programs accused by unions of misconduct or found to be non-compliant with minor government regulations and DEI benchmarks.
States would also have to provide “a detailed, actionable plan” for advancing DEI. As DOL notes, some states suggested it “should avoid adding to or changing the regulations” governing “equal employment opportunity” because existing administrative requirements were “too long, complicated, or burdensome.” But DOL disagreed.
One result of DOL’s regulations will be fewer job-training opportunities for minorities. The rule will also undercut the Administration’s industrial policy and climate agenda. The Inflation Reduction Act’s myriad green energy tax credits require employers to utilize apprentices from government-approved programs. Good luck finding them.
President Biden’s message to non-union apprentices: You’re fired.
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Elon Musk vs. the Administrative State
SpaceX fights an NLRB attack on the company’s employment practices.
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Jan. 8, 2024 6:16 pm ET
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Journal Editorial Report: The week's best and worst from Kim Strassel, Bill McGurn and Dan Henninger. Images: AP/Zuma Press Composite: Mark Kelly
SpaceX wants to colonize Mars, but first it’s taking on a more difficult mission: Rolling back the administrative state. CEO Elon Musk’s firm is challenging the structure and powers of the National Labor Relations Board.
A regional director at the NLRB last week charged SpaceX with retaliating against employees who wrote an open letter criticizing Mr. Musk. The complaint alleged that the company unfairly barred workers from discussing the letter and “created an impression of surveillance” by “showing employees screen shots of communications between employees.”
SpaceX responded with a lawsuit in federal court arguing that the board’s structure and administrative trials are unconstitutional. The suit leans in part on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’s SEC v. Jarkesy precedent. The Supreme Court heard the Securities and Exchange Commission’s appeal in the case in November, and a decision is expected by June.
Jarkesy held that the SEC administrative law judges’ dual layers of protection from presidential removal violate the Constitution’s command that the President must “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.’” The Fifth Circuit also held that the SEC’s administrative process for adjudicating fraud claims violates the Seventh Amendment’s right to a jury trial.
Like SEC administrative law judges, the NLRB’s judges can only be removed for good cause as found by a Merit Systems Protection Board whose members can only be removed for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” Similar to the SEC, the NLRB asserts the power to extract monetary damages from defendants. SpaceX argues that such claims belong in federal court where defendants enjoy a right to a jury trial.
The SpaceX lawsuit also seeks to break new legal ground by taking aim at the NLRB’s combination of adjudicative, legislative and executive power, which it argues violates the constitutional separation of powers and due process. NLRB members rule on charges brought in its administrative courts and decide whether to seek injunctive relief in federal court.
Members of other independent agencies do the same, but SpaceX argues that the NLRB’s procedural unfairness is magnified because the board “has chosen to promulgate virtually all the legal rules in its field through adjudication rather than rulemaking.”
In other words, the board uses internal adjudications to write new labor law. When a party appeals a board decision in federal court, the NLRB then claims that its interpretations of labor law based on its precedents and fact finding deserve judicial deference. Imagine a district attorney writing the law and hearing cases that it prosecutes under that law.
The “accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands” is “the very definition of tyranny,” SpaceX writes, citing James Madison’s Federalist No. 47. Congress has granted the NLRB and other independent agencies sweeping powers that would have made the founders blanch. But the agencies have also expanded their purview.
The Biden NLRB is a case in point. The board’s statutory mission is to protect workers’ right to organize, but it is rewriting labor law to limit employer rights to manage their workforces. Credit to SpaceX for firing a rocket at the administrative state.
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/government-raid-of-amish-farm-an-attempt-to-criminalize-independence-independent-farmer-5560929?utm_source=Health&src_src=Health&utm_campaign=health-2024-01-10&src_cmp=health-2024-01-10&utm_medium=email&est=30o1Vvc7Q8UM6lOxV6ntapoOtecnhLMh7Qs2fSk3AHD31IMbWxsGKDYaBMh4EsD3pflY
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https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/15/faa-pushes-to-hire-people-with-severe-intellectual-psychiatric-disabilities-in-the-name-of-diversity/
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Federal Contracting Is the Next DEI Target
Companies are required to meet strict hiring ‘goals’ that would be illegal anywhere else.
By Michael Toth
Jan. 15, 2024 4:30 pm ET
Some 3,000 demonstrators march to protest the lack of black men working in the construction industry in Pittsburgh, Pa., Sept. 15, 1969. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS
Critics of diversity, equity and inclusion policies scored an important victory with last year’s Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, and a symbolic one with Claudine Gay’s resignation as Harvard’s president. But while some universities and businesses have pivoted from DEI to get in line with the high court’s ruling, Washington’s diversity-industrial complex marches on. It’s time for the federal government to play by the same antidiscrimination rules private companies have to follow.
Federal affirmative-action programs originated in the Nixon administration. In 1969 Labor Secretary George Shultz launched the Philadelphia Plan, which required companies bidding for federal construction projects in that city to commit to minority hiring goals. Within a year of announcing the plan, the administration extended it to cover all federal agencies. Fifty-five years later, those rules are still in place.
Federal regulations require prime contractors or subcontractors “with 50 or more employees and a contract of $50,000 or more” to submit “a written affirmative action program” for each of their locations. The rules dictate that a contractor’s workforce should “reflect the gender, racial and ethnic profile of the labor pools from which the contractor recruits and selects.” Employing less than 80% of the local share of “any race, sex, or ethnic group” is categorized as an “adverse impact.” Failure to comply with these federal diversity mandates could mean the cancellation of existing contracts, and violators could be barred from doing future business with the federal government. It’s safest to hire by the numbers.
Since the Nixon administration, the federal government has successfully argued that Executive Order 11246, which President Lyndon Johnson signed in 1965, gives it authority to use race-based affirmative action in awarding contracts. The order requires contractors to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race.” In 1971, a federal appeals court upheld the Philadelphia Plan on the grounds that the executive order releases the executive branch from the “general prohibition against discrimination” found in the Civil Rights Act.
Putting aside whether that court got it right in 1971, the federal government’s race-based contracting rules can be undone through the same process through which they were promulgated. It takes two steps. First, the next president should amend the order and remove the basis for federal government regulations that push contractors to pursue diversity hires.
The updated order should quote President John F. Kennedy, who first inserted the “affirmative action” requirement into a 1961 executive order but didn’t intend the mandate to lead to racial preferences or quotas, which he opposed. “We are too mixed, this society of ours,” Kennedy said at a 1963 press conference, “to begin to divide ourselves on the basis of race or color.”
Second, the president should instruct the labor secretary to comb through existing rules issued under the order and rescind any that push racial quotas. The demands for written affirmative-action plans should be scrapped. So should the federal contracting rules that circumvent equal-opportunity requirements through work-arounds such as the Philadelphia Plan’s disingenuous quota-goal distinction. As Chief Justice John Roberts put it in Fair Admissions: “What cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly. . . . The prohibition against racial discrimination is leveled at the thing, not the name.”
DEI foes are hungry for their next fight. They should look no further than the federal government’s affirmative-action programs. They might change for the better the way federal contractors do business.
Mr. Toth is an attorney in Austin, Texas
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Vivek spoke passionately and well on this subject:
The Case for the Supreme Court to Overturn Chevron Deference
A 40-year-old judicial doctrine has become a license for regulators to grab power from Congress.
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Jan. 15, 2024 6:41 pm ET
The Supreme Court has been trying to restore the proper constitutional balance of power, and its next opportunity comes Wednesday when it hears two cases challenging its own landmark Chevron doctrine (Loper Bright Enterprises, Inc., v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Dept. of Commerce).
In 1984 in Chevron v. NRDC, the Justices ruled that courts should defer to administrative agencies’ interpretation of laws when the statutory text is silent or ambiguous. In practice this has become a license for Congress to write vague laws that delegate legislative power to administrative agencies. Over the last 40 years the federal register of regulations has grown by tens of thousands of pages.
Wednesday’s cases are textbook examples of how regulators invoke Chevron to expand their power and impose enormous burdens on Americans. Family-owned herring fisheries and vessel operators are challenging an obscure Commerce rule that requires New England fisheries to pay for on-board monitors.
The 1976 Magnuson-Stevens Act regulates fishery management in federal waters and permits the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to require vessels to “carry” federal observers to enforce its regulations. But only in three narrow circumstances does the law require vessels to pay for their federal monitors—none of which apply to the plaintiffs.
Congress declined to appropriate funds to pay for on-board monitors to enforce fishing regulations, so NMFS in 2020 decided to compel the fisheries to foot the cost. The agency estimated that a monitor would cost fisheries $710 a day and reduce annual financial returns by about 20%.
Two appellate courts ruled for the agency based on a two-step Chevron analysis. Courts first review if a law is clear. If the text is ambiguous or silent on a matter, courts must consider if an agency’s interpretation is reasonable. If judges rule it is, they must defer to the agency.
A First Circuit Court of Appeals panel upheld the fisheries rule because the “default norm” is “the government does not reimburse regulated entities for the cost of complying with properly enacted regulations.” A divided D.C. Circuit panel found the law was somewhat ambiguous, but the agency’s interpretation was reasonable.
But as D.C. Circuit Judge Justin Walker noted in dissent, “Congress unambiguously did not” authorize NMFS’s mandate. The agency “identified no other context in which an agency, without express direction from Congress, requires an industry to fund its inspection regime,” and the government’s theory could “undermine Congress’s power of the purse.”
Chevron arose when judges were willy-nilly substituting their policy preferences for those of the elected branch. But the doctrine has no constitutional basis, and it defies the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires that “the reviewing court shall decide all relevant questions of law, interpret constitutional and statutory provisions, and determine the meaning or applicability of the terms of an agency action.”
As the fisheries argue, the doctrine also violates the Constitution’s Due Process Clause “by requiring courts to systematically place a thumb on the scale against the citizenry.” While agencies’ purely factual findings may deserve judicial deference, requiring courts to defer to regulators on the law undermines the separation of powers.
The late Justice Antonin Scalia supported Chevron after he joined the Court, but he later expressed misgivings as judges bowed to regulators even when they were stretching or rewriting the law. One result has been pendulum swings in public policy with every new presidential administration as agencies reinterpret laws to advance their agenda.
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The current Supreme Court has danced around Chevron for several terms. In 2022 it overruled a D.C. Circuit decision that upheld a hospital drug payment rule under Chevron but declined to overturn the precedent.
The Court has relied instead on its major questions doctrine to strike down such executive overreach as the Biden student loan forgiveness. But why should federal agencies benefit from a lower standard of judicial review for regulations that judges deem minor but which are enormously consequential for particular parties?
The Justice Department invokes stare decisis for preserving Chevron. But stare decisis carries less weight when the Court is reviewing judge-made interpretive methods than it does in other kinds of cases. Overturning Chevron is an important act of judicial housecleaning that would rein in the administrative state and encourage Congress to write clear laws.
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Congress and Chevron Deference
The judicial doctrine has made it easy to abdicate power to bureaucrats.
By The Editorial Board
Jan. 17, 2024 6:38 pm ET
Judging by the left’s reaction, the Supreme Court’s oral arguments on Wednesday in two cases challenging the doctrine of Chevron deference didn’t go well for the government. “Disturbing oral arguments suggest dark turn for Supreme Court,” moaned the Alliance for Justice. Progressives are disturbed that the Justices might make Congress do its job.
Wednesday’s cases (Relentless v. Dept. of Commerce, and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo) concern a regulation issued by the Trump Administration. Commerce contends that the government can force herring fisheries to pay for on-board federal monitors because federal law is silent on the matter. Lower courts agreed based on the Court’s Chevron doctrine, which requires judges to defer to regulators when the text is ambiguous as long as their interpretation of the law is reasonable.
Justice Elena Kagan said it’s up to Congress to overturn Chevron. But as fisheries’ attorney Paul Clement rightly rejoined: “I’m not sure everybody in Congress wants to overrule Chevron . . . It’s really convenient for some members of Congress not to have to tackle the hard questions and to rely on their friends in the executive branch to get them everything they want.”
He added that even if Congress were to pass a law overturning Chevron, “the President would veto it.” In any event, he said, Chevron wrongly “assumes that ambiguity is always a delegation” to the executive branch. More often, ambiguity is “‘I don’t have enough votes in Congress to make it clear, so I’m going to leave it ambiguous . . . and then we’ll give it to my friends in the agency.’”
By allowing Congress to pass off responsibility to regulators, Chevron has contributed to legislative dysfunction and gridlock. Congress has failed to pass a law regulating crypto-currency after the FTX fiasco, Mr. Clement said, “because there’s an agency head out there that thinks that he already has the authority to address this uniquely 21st century problem with a couple of statutes passed in the 1930s.”
Perhaps he means Securities and Exchange Chairman Gary Gensler. “And he’s going to wave his wand, and he’s going to say the words ‘investment contract’ are ambiguous,” Mr. Clement said. Or consider that the Federal Communications Commission has rewritten broadband regulation four times in 14 years.
It’s not too much to say Chevron has corrupted all three branches of government. It lets Congress abdicate its duty to write clear laws, the bureaucracy to grab more power, and the courts to abandon their normal method of judicial review. Time for the High Court to restore constitutional equilibrium.
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This would appear to be a BFD!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcSPEk0WHz4
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https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/03/two_steps_to_heaven.html
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(2) FEDERAL JUDGE SAYS DOJ ADMIN COURTS UNCONSTITUTIONAL: Federal District Judge J. Randall Hall ruled Department of Justice (DOJ) administrative law judges assess penalties and forfeitures against private parties on behalf of the government without Congressional supervision required by Article II of the U.S. Constitution.
Why It Matters: More than three dozen federal agencies and cabinet departments use administrative law judges and their own appeals system, which operates effectively as a shadow court system against people and companies targeted by federal agencies. These individuals and companies must make it through these courts before getting their case to a state or federal court. The Supreme Court decision on SEC v. Jarkesy and cases that could strike down Chevron Deference are still pending. However, the Supreme Court signaled in previous cases that it is interested in curtailing what some legal scholars say is unconstitutional overreach by federal agencies. – R.C.
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(1) BIDEN’S SOLUTION TO MED SHORTAGE WILL INCREASE COSTS: White House advisor Neera Tanden said the Biden administration is pushing Congress to establish a Manufacturing Resiliency Assessment Program and a Hospital Resilient Supply Program.
According to the proposed plan, these programs would allow the federal government to reward hospitals that purchase medicines from reliable, diverse suppliers and punish hospitals that do not.
Why It Matters: The Biden administration plan does not address the nature of the shortage, which is U.S. reliance on foreign labs and supply chains for key medicines and precursors. This plan, which penalizes hospitals for purchasing from the most prevalent and low-cost sources, will likely raise costs for Americans. – R.C.
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(1) BIDEN LOCKS IN SCHEDULE F BLOCK AGAINST TRUMP: The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) released a final rule yesterday intended to block a potential Trump administration from reclassifying civil service employees into a new job schedule with fewer protections.
A Biden official said a future administration would not be able to change the rule through executive action but would have to follow the same public rule-making process.
Why It Matters: Blocking the reimplementation of Schedule F is a priority for the Biden White House and Democratic Party. Reclassifying federal civil service employees into Schedule F, as the Trump administration attempted to do, would return federal executive branch employees under the more direct control of the White House. The federal civil service has become a de facto independent branch of government, and immunity from being fired has allowed federal agencies to undermine the previous Trump administration without consequence. – R.C.
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Would Biden do this if most government employees (at least the DCers) were Rs? !
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He Lied:
WSJ Editorial
The Internal Revenue Service got an audit of its own in time for Tax Day, and two irregularities jump out. President Biden’s plan to hire a new army of tax collectors is falling flat, and the agents already at work are targeting the middle class.
Those are two findings of the IRS’s watchdog, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (Tigta). The report examines IRS progress on mandates from the Biden Administration backed by tens of billions in new funding. The first supposed goal was to audit more ultrawealthy and fewer middle-class filers, but it’s not going so well.
By last December the IRS decided that it wouldn’t begin tracking its progress until later this year. That’s because the agency has been slow to shift its focus to high-income taxpayers, who make up a small share of total filings. Its April 2023 strategic plan pledged that future audits would disproportionately target individuals making at least $400,000, but “did not include specifics on how the IRS was going to ensure it met this commitment,” says Tigta.
The most recent data suggests the IRS is still focused on the middle class. As of last summer, 63% of new audits targeted taxpayers with income of less than $200,000. Only a small overall share reached the very highest earners, while 80% of audits covered filers earning less than $1 million. Don’t forget to save those charitable-giving receipts.
Sluggish hiring might explain the slow shift. To its credit, the IRS never claimed it would decrease its middle-class audits, only that audits on higher-earners would become a majority. A fleet of new agents were supposed to turn their sights on rich tax dodgers. But apparently the job is in scarce demand.
Tigta reports that revenue-agent recruitment is “far below” the agency’s target, and it hired only 34 in the first six months of its expansion, according to trade publication Government Executive. That compares with its goal of 3,700 in the first year.
The agency faces the same tight labor market as any other employer, but the job specs aren’t bad. A typical salary for these agents is about $125,000, plus public-employee perks such as up to $60,000 in student-loan forgiveness. But for one reason or another, America’s treasurers and accountants aren’t lining up to become federal tax collectors.
All of this should encourage the House Republicans working to claw back more of the $80 billion that Democrats funneled to the IRS. For all that new money, Congress is so far getting the same old agency.
https://apple.news/AZVbhdOdHTwqFZfj2nmqUUg
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https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/democracy-means-never-having-to-hear?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=330796&post_id=143418794&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=z2120&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email