Regs Talk: The CSS Blog
Blogs are authored by CSS members and policy experts, and have been reprinted with permission.
Supreme Court Case Threatens One of the SEC’s Most Powerful Weapons to Fight Fraud
By Better Markets Making crooks and lawbreakers give up their ill-gotten gains is critical to making sure “crime does not pay,” which is key to deterring future crimes. After all, if you get to keep what you illegally took, that wasn’t yours, then you are incentivized to do it again. This is called “disgorgement” and […]
Report Shows SEC’s Whistleblower Program Is Wildly Successful, Should Not Be Weakened
By Better Markets The SEC just submitted its 2019 Annual Report on its Whistleblower Program to Congress, which proves – again – that whistleblowers perform a vital public service by revealing fraudulent and illegal conduct. The SEC’s Whistleblower Program was created in the Dodd-Frank Act and designed to reward and protect whistleblowers. As a result of the […]
DuPont’s Worst Nightmare: “Dark Waters” Speaks the Truth About PFAS Science
By Genna Reed, Union of Concerned Scientists The image accompanying the 2016 New York Times piece, “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare” has stuck with me since I first read it. The contrast of a man in a dark suit with darkened eyes and a grave face standing on a West Virginia farm on a wintry day is […]
Reform Is Long Overdue for FERC’s Gas Pipeline Reviews
By Gillian Giannetti, Natural Resources Defense Council It’s been almost two years since the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission announced that it would take a fresh look at its 20-year-old policy that guides its reviews of new gas pipeline projects, and almost 18 months since NRDC and others filed more than 1,600 comments with the agency on this very question. […]
New Analysis Shows Government Lacks Plans to Save Endangered Species From Climate Change
By Jacob Carter, Union of Concerned Scientists Today, a new analysis published in Nature Climate Change shows that the US government doesn’t have many plans to conserve hundreds of endangered species that are at-risk of being affected by climate change. The analysis finds that 99.8% of the 459 US animals listed as endangered under the Endangered Species […]
Trump EPA’s Industry-Friendly TSCA Policy Starts to Unravel
By Daniel Rosenberg, Natural Resources Defense Council When the history of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) is written, November 14, 2019 will be remembered as the date when the anti-science policies the Trump administration wrote after the chemical industry takeover of EPA’s Toxics Office in January 2017 started to unravel. That’s when the 9th Circuit […]
The Terrible Thing About EPA’s Restricted Science Rule That We Aren’t Talking About
By Anita Desikan, Union of Concerned Scientists Alarmingly, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is attempting to choke off the science that can be considered in the policymaking process in a way that will almost certainly hamper the efforts to monitor and protect people from environmental health hazards throughout the US, but especially in underserved communities. […]
New Bill Cracks Down on Sky-High CEO Pay
By the Teamsters The Teamsters for years have been at the forefront of pushing back on excessive CEO pay. Now the union is glad to see some on Capitol Hill agree. Lawmakers yesterday rolled out the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act, which would impose tax rate increases on companies with CEO-to-median-worker pay rates greater than 50-to-1. Penalties would […]
Notable Moments from the Hearing on EPA’s Proposal to Sideline Science
By Michael Halpern, Union of Concerned Scientists The House Science Committee yesterday held a hearing on EPA’s horrendous proposal to sideline public health research when it makes decisions. I livetweeted the hearing, as did UCS’s Allison Cain and NRDC’s John Walke. There were several revealing moments that tell us more about EPA’s strategy, highlight the forces behind the proposal, and emphasize […]
Thank You, Congress, for Putting Patients First
By Rachel Esster, National Women’s Law Center In May, the Trump-Pence Administration finalized a rule that would allow a provider’s personal beliefs to dictate patient care. This week, Congress is fighting back. Members of Congress are joining together to introduce the Put Patients First Act (H.R. 5036; S. 2836). This bill would stop the dangerous […]
Attack on Dishwasher Standards Hurts Consumers, Environment
By Joe Vukovich, Natural Resources Defense Council Under the guise of responding to consumer complaints that today’s energy- and water-efficient dishwashers take too long, the Department of Energy has proposed creating a new class of dishwashers that wouldn’t be subject to any water or energy efficiency standards at all. The move would not only undermine […]
Facing Climate Change on US Farms: An Urgent Need for Science-Based Policy
By Marica Delonge, Union of Concerned Scientists It’s already November, but farmers across the nation are still suffering in the aftermath of a series of extreme weather events that wrought havoc this year. It began with devastating spring flooding and wet weather that was record-setting, visible from space, and had ripple effects far beyond the farm. Some farmers in the […]
Five Things to Yell About in the EPA’s New Opaque “Transparency” Supplemental Rule
By Andrew Rosenberg, Union of Concerned Scientists A leaked draft of the Environmental Protection Agency’s soon-to-be-released supplemental proposal to their so-called Transparency Proposed Rule from last year shows that the administration is making a bad proposal worse. The supplement is, in theory, intended to address issues raised in the more than 600,000 comments the agency received last year. All […]
Fighting for Your Clean Water in Court
By Amy Souers Kober, American Rivers American Rivers and our partners are challenging in court the Trump administration’s effort to strip away crucial clean water protections from rivers, lakes, streams and other waters that feed drinking-water sources for 200 million Americans. The legal challenge, filed on October 23 in the U.S. District Court for the […]
Updated Restricted Science Rule Spells Reanalysis Paralysis for the EPA
By Genna Reed, Union of Concerned Scientists Instead of listening to over a half million comments and abandoning a truly harmful rule, the EPA has forged ahead with its restricted science proposal, according to the New York Times reporting of a supplemental notice that exposes many of the flaws of the original proposal in high definition. The […]
The EPA’s Move to Handcuff Scientists Will Sicken and Kill People
By Michael Halpern, Union of Concerned Scientists The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is doubling down on a proposal that would effectively force the agency to ignore thousands of scientific studies when responding to public health threats and setting pollution standards. It could also compromise scientific assessments produced by the EPA on a wide variety of topics, including on […]
Courts Matter: Veterans Day
By Alliance for Justice This week, we celebrate Veterans Day and honor those who served in our armed forces. To ensure that our veterans and servicemembers can enjoy the rights and protections they have sacrificed to uphold, Congress has passed a variety of laws to protect them. Rightly so; our veterans deserve affordable health care, employment and consumer protections, […]
While GM Fights Stronger Standards, Its Chevy Malibu Proves It Can Meet Them
By Dave Cooke, Union of Concerned Scientists Recently General Motors, Fiat-Chrysler, Toyota, and other automakers sided with the Trump administration to fight California’s ability to set strong emissions standards. While this fight tramples all over the Clean Air Act and state leadership, GM and others are pushing the administration to rollback the One National Program we already have so […]
We Won Our Lawsuit: Another Loss for the Trump-Pence Administration, Another Victory for Patients’ Rights and the Rule of Law
By Michelle Banker, Lauren Gorodetsky and Sunu P. Chandy, National Women’s Law Center The National Women’s Law Center teamed up with lawyers from Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Democracy Forward Foundation, and the firm Covington & Burling to represent Planned Parenthood in a lawsuit brought in federal court in New York challenging the discriminatory Trump-Pence Administration refusal […]
Data Gaps and Market Disruptions
By Dr. Steve Suppan, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy If the financial markets were a global plumbing system, inaccurate or incomplete financial reporting would be leaks in the system. A leak here or there wouldn’t disrupt the public’s understanding of the financial risks of their investments and the solvency of the major market players. […]