Regs Talk: The CSS Blog

By Ed Mierzwinski, U.S. PIRG I’ve been reading the CFPB’s mail. It’s okay, you can too. It’s public. Not surprisingly, the latest CFPB consumer complaints paint a grim picture of the pandemic’s effect on family finances. I ask: Why isn’t the CFPB doing more to help the struggling...

By Gideon Weissman, Frontier Group Mortgage servicers failed Americans during the last recession. And if early data from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is any indication, history may well be on its way to repeating. Last week, I published a blog post describing the...

By Paul Cort, Earthjustice The future of the nation’s clean car protections is on the table, and Andrew Wheeler, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is moving forward with a plan that will unleash tailpipe pollution across the country. The Trump administration would...

By Katlyn Schmitt and Dave Owen, Center for Progressive Reform Sometime soon, EPA is expected to release its final rule limiting state and tribal authority to conduct water quality certifications under section 401 of the Clean Water Act. A water quality certification is the most...

By Sarah Reinhardt, Union of Concerned Scientists As US cases of COVID-19 near 1.7 million, we continue to learn more about the nature of the disease, including the factors that influence susceptibility to COVID-19 and the severity of symptoms. Some of these risk factors, like...

By Adrian Shelley, Public Citizen President Trump is most in his element when on the defensive. Attacking his critics allows Trump’s insults, rants, and meandering interpretations of reality to flow more easily.   This has come to typify Trump’s tweetstorms: long string...

By Miriam Goldstein and Alexandra Carter, Center for American Progress The United States is in the midst of a health and economic crisis. Yet instead of taking critical action to help the millions of suffering Americans, the Trump administration continues to push forwar...

By Melanie Benesh, Environmental Working Group The toxic fluorinated compounds known as PFAS belong to a family with hundreds of different members. They are linked to an array of health risks, including cancer, thyroid disruption, reproductive and developmental harms, reduced...

By American Lung Association During the industrial revolution, air pollution from booming industrial manufacturers and a growing network of train lines first became a significant public health issue.  People in urban areas became used to the sight of large plumes of smoke...

By Marya Reiter, Farmworker Justice The lack of a federal standard to protect agricultural workers from heat stress endangers the health and lives of farmworkers across the U.S. Heat stress is a frequent risk to farmworkers, who often spend long periods doing physically-demanding...

By Mary Anne Hitt, Sierra Club This week, clean air supporters broke down the virtual doors of an EPA hearing on a Trump air pollution proposal, and I’m so here for it. They overwhelmed the EPA on the first and second days of online hearings on the Trump administration’s...

By Abigail Dillen, Earthjustice The Trump administration never lets a crisis go to waste. This week, in the middle of a global pandemic that has killed more than 90,000 Americans and left 35 million unemployed, President Trump ordered federal agencies to seek out regulations to...

By Darya Minovi and James Goodwin, Center for Progressive Reform Earlier this week, we submitted a public comment to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), criticizing the agency’s March 2020 supplemental proposal for its “censored science” rulemaking. This rule,...

By Marc Yaggi, Waterkeeper Alliance Re: The Trump Administration Is Reversing 100 Environmental Rules. Here’s the Full List, The New York Times When Richard Nixon vetoed the Clean Water Act in 1972, he called the Act “budget-wrecking,” saying, “Legislation which would continue...

By Danielle Melgar, U.S. PIRG Johnson & Johnson announced on Tuesday that it has ended the sale of talc-based baby powders in the United States and Canada. That’s a big win for consumers, because talc is often contaminated with asbestos, which can cause cancer. As of March,...

By Dr. Steve Suppan, Institute for Agriculture & Trade Policy On May 13, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC or Commission) issued a warning to the trading platforms, clearing organizations (the back office processing of trades) and futures contract merchants: the...

By Rebecca Boehm, Union of Concerned Scientists On April 28, President Trump issued an executive order directing slaughterhouses and meat and poultry processing plants to remain open as critical infrastructure. The order noted that these facilities should follow CDC guidelines to...

By Luke Tonachel, Natural Resources Defense Council According to two new bombshell articles this week, EPA staff experts had as many concerns about the Trump administration’s rollback of clean car standards as those of us on the outside have. The understated, factual criticisms...

By Scott Faber, Environmental Working Group The news, announced Tuesday, that Johnson & Johnson will soon end the sale of baby powder with talc is long overdue. Because talc and asbestos can form in the same parent rock, cosmetics made with talc can become contaminated with...

By Natural Resources Defense Council Citing the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, President Trump issued a sweeping executive order that directs federal agencies, like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, to roll back or fail to enforce a wide range of regulations...

By Anita Desikan, Union of Concerned Scientists Despite the incredible efforts of Dr. Anthony Fauci and other scientists in the White House Coronavirus Task Force, the Trump White House has pushed aside CDC scientists from communicating with the public during the COVID-19...

By Elliot Mincberg, People For the American Way Trump D.C. Circuit judge Neomi Rao argued in dissent that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) should be allowed to completely scrap a previous rule that restricted industry use of dangerous hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) without...

By Vijay Limaye, John Walke and Emily Davis, Natural Resources Defense Council As the coronavirus continues to impose significant health and economic hardship and disrupt daily life, it is becoming ever clearer that federal leaders should rely on the best available science to...

By Genna Reed, Union of Concerned Scientists Today, UCS submitted our comment on the Environmental Protection Agency’s flawed strengthening transparency rule. In our view, this is a proposal beyond fixing. It rests upon an erroneous assumption that the EPA’s regulatory science is...

By Bonnie Rice, Sierra Club “We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals … We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be...

By Sara Imperiale and Margaret Brown, Natural Resources Defense Council As of January 2020, the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) served more than 37 million people. More than 80 percent of recipient households are families with children, seniors, or those...

By Gretchen Goldman, Union of Concerned Scientists The Trump Administration is set to ignore science and risk your health on an air pollution rule that will affect millions of people in the US. EPA Administrator Wheeler is going against EPA scientists and against the...

By Erik D. Olson, Natural Resources Defense Council In an extraordinary decision, President Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Andrew Wheeler has decided to defy a court-ordered consent decree requiring the agency to issue a drinking water standard for...

By David Madland, Center for American Progress Action Fund In recent weeks, scores of essential workers across the country—from meatpackers and warehouse workers to transit employees and grocery clerks—have gone on strike to demand safer working conditions and higher wages that...

By Sarah Graddy, Soren Rundquist and Bill Walker, Environmental Working Group Counties with or near meatpacking plants have almost twice the rate of known COVID-19 infections as the national average, according to a geospatial analysis by the Environmental Working Group. Based on...

By Jeremy Richardson, Union of Concerned Scientists As I often say to friends and colleagues, the issues we face as a society are complex and simply cannot be reduced to bumper sticker slogans. Sometimes, however, the reality is strikingly simply—and staring us right in the face....

By Lucas Rhoads, Natural Resources Defense Council Friday, May 15th is Endangered Species Day, a time to cherish the world’s biodiversity and to celebrate the many conservation successes of the past fifty years. It’s also a time to recognize that fighting for these species...

By Genna Reed, Union of Concerned Scientists As I balance working from home and caring for my toddler, I spend a lot of time staring at the scores of products in my home that the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is tasked with keeping safe. Cribs, highchairs, toys, arts...

By Melanie Benesh and Jared Hayes, Environmental Working Group Depending on the season, an estimated 1 million to 2.7 million workers, mostly undocumented, toil on the nation’s farms. Without farmworkers, the American food system would collapse – and during the coronavirus...

By Dave Cooke, Union of Concerned Scientists While the administration just finalized its reduction in vehicle efficiency from 5 percent per year to no better than a measly 1.5 percent per year (despite their own evidence showing how bad it is for the country), that hasn’t stopped...

By Daniel Rosenberg, Natural Resources Defense Council You may have heard recent reports about the White House burying detailed guidance by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to help safely re-open amid the pandemic. The White House and CDC have claimed that the head of the...

By Natural Resources Defense Council In our 112th lawsuit against the Trump administration, NRDC sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today after the agency reversed a rule that aims to prevent leaks of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs)—potent chemicals used in commercial and...

By Sarah Christopherson and Olivia Snavely, National Women’s Health Network Under federal law, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) can impose Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies (REMS) on drugs that it believes could do more harm than good if not carefully...

By Elizabeth Tang, National Women’s Law Center It’s here. Betsy DeVos has released—in the middle of a global pandemic—a new Title IX rule that weakens protections against sexual harassment in school. DeVos finalizing this rule during the COVID-19 crisis instead of providing...

By Matthew Freeman, Center for Progressive Reform In the latest episode of CPR Board President Rob Verchick’s Connect the Dots podcast, he and CPR Member Scholars Michael Duff and Thomas McGarity explore worker safety issues in the era of the coronavirus. McGarity begins...

By Ed Mierzwinski, U.S. PIRG Public health experts have made it abundantly clear that to safely lift stay-at-home rules we must have four key things we don’t yet have. We need fast, accurate and widely available testing. We need a better plan for isolating and supporting people...

By Michael Halpern, Union of Concerned Scientists The Environmental Protection Agency is advancing a broad proposal to restrict the use of science at the agency with no official public hearings and a limited sixty-day comment period, which ends on May 18. The rule is the...

By David S. Hilzenrath, Project on Government Oversight Last year, based on growing concerns about the safety of certain sunscreens, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published a plan of action. It proposed concluding that, for two sunscreen ingredients, the risks outweigh...

By Elliot Mincberg, People For the American Way Today, the Supreme Court held oral arguments in the Supreme Court in two cases concerning the Trump administration rule that severely limits contraceptive coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). As always, it is difficult to...

By Emily Peterson-Cassin, Public Citizen There’s good news, and there’s bad news. The good news is that a bill is about to be introduced in the U.S. Senate to offer some protections around the new data being collected by companies that are tracking our health and movement in the...

By Genna Reed, Union of Concerned Scientists As the U.S. government responds to the COVID-19 crisis, it is imperative that frontline communities and essential workers are not saddled with the cost of hastily made decisions. On March 25, EPA announced that efforts were underway to...

By Vijay Limaye, Natural Resources Defense Council As the United States observes Air Quality Awareness Week, a new report commissioned by NRDC highlights the landmark achievements of the Clean Air Act to protect our health. Since its near-unanimous passage by Congress 50 years...

By Celine McNicholas and Margaret Poydock, Economic Policy Institute In response to the coronavirus pandemic, Congress has now passed four separate relief and recovery measures allocating trillions of dollars in aid, but none have provided meaningful protections to working...

By Simon Mui and Amanda Levin, Natural Resources Defense Council Marking the 50th anniversary of the first ever Earth Day, a newly released study finds that air pollution programs implemented under the federal Clean Air Act are saving hundreds of thousands of lives and delivering...

By Rebecca Jones, Project on Government Oversight As the world contends with the coronavirus pandemic, decision-makers cannot afford to kick objective science to the sidelines. Yet on April 21 the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) demoted Rick Bright, a career expert...

By Patrice Simms and Hilton Kelley, Earthjustice The Trump administration is using the virus as cover to give industries a wink and a nod that it will let them off the hook when it comes to emissions releases and reporting. In the city of Port Arthur, Texas, people are used...