from The Wall Street Journal
The Bush administration is expected to launch a push for business-friendly regulation, possibly including streamlined and more flexible pollution standards, chemical-handling rules, and workers' medical-leave protections.
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WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration is expected to launch a push for business-friendly regulation, possibly including streamlined and more flexible pollution standards, chemical-handling rules, and workers' medical-leave protections.
The stated aim is to improve the overall climate for U.S. manufacturing, a sector hammered by recession and overseas competition during much of President Bush's first term.
But Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, a pro-consumer group that monitors the White House Office of Management and Budget, called the effort a new assault on anticompetitive rules that amounts to rewarding Mr. Bush's political supporters in the business world.
OMB is leading the effort, which may be launched as early as this week, through its Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The project is being coordinated by former Harvard professor John Graham, who has turned OMB's regulatory arm into a voice for the administration's pro-business views on regulation, after years of relative inaction under the Clinton administration.
The campaign appears in part to be a recycling of a broader effort from Mr. Bush's first term to overhaul outmoded regulations governmentwide. That initiative achieved less than the administration hoped, because some agencies dragged their feet on the White House's suggested changes, according to regulatory experts.
Now observers say they sense a new seriousness of purpose on the White House's part. "They recognize that the [regulatory] hit list didn't achieve the results they wanted" during the first term, says Robert Shull, a senior analyst at OMB Watch.
This time, administration officials "are serious about doing something," adds Lawrence Fineran, vice president of regulatory and competition policy for the National Association of Manufacturers, which supports the administration's efforts.
The initiative comes as business interests are making headway in Washington on several fronts, including tightening class-action rules and consumer-bankruptcy laws.
The White House is expected to put forward a new priority list of regulations for agencies to rewrite or push through. Some changes would be relative tweaks, while others would be substantial. Changes would be made administratively with little or no input from Congress.
OIRA gave what some experts regard as a preview of the regulatory- review effort in December, when it published several lists of rules for which either the administration or business and other private- sector groups had sought overhaul. Much of the new initiative is expected to focus on industry-nominated changes. But an OMB official said yesterday only that the agency was finalizing plans to release its report on rules to be revisited. OMB will take into consideration the recommendations it received but "won't necessarily implement all these," the official said.
For example, a number of businesses and trade groups have suggested revisions to ease the burdens imposed by environmental standards, including rules defining what constitutes hazardous waste, as well as spill-prevention control and some toxic-release reporting requirements for businesses, Mr. Fineran said. Rules for handling toxic and hazardous materials -- such as community right-to-know laws concerning presence of chemicals at local plants -- also have drawn criticism.
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