In the News

This week, the public comment period closed on Secretary of Energy Rick Perry’s plan to keep uncompetitive, inefficient and highly polluting coal plants from retiring. If successful, his plan will enrich coal executives and investors at the expense of working Americans, while having pernicious public health consequences.

Jason Schwartz, legal director for the New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity, said the Trump administration has “decimated” the social cost of carbon. The new analysis makes several key changes that Schwartz said are out of step with the thinking of economists. The new value has been narrowed to only consider the domestic impacts of carbon, while the Obama administration’s version also took into account the global impacts, Schwartz noted. And in contrast to the Obama administration, which assumed a 3% discount rate, the new value assumes a 7% discount rate that Schwartz said “virtually no economist surveyed or written in the literature supports using.”

Pruitt is taking other steps to soften the ground for the weak rule he is expected to issue. Many of them involve monkeying around with cost-benefit analysis to make carbon regulation look as bad as possible. For more on these cost-benefit shenanigans, see this excellent piece from Richard Revesz and Jack Lienke of the Institute for Policy Integrity and the original reporting from Politico’s Emily Holden on which it’s based.

The Trump administration in an awkward place. Even after straining to show the repeal of the Obama-era rules would boost the economy by baking into their plan financial assumptions that many experts dispute, their plan as written still doesn’t do much for the sagging coal industry. “In order to justify this, they do serious violence to established economics,” Richard Revesz, dean emeritus at New York University School of Law, said of the repeal. “The level of contortions and the attacks on standard economic principles are unprecedented.”

The GOP offered years of lies and impossible promises, which have come due. In health care: Obamacare is a disaster; the GOP alternative will have none of its flaws. In climate: the CPP will crush the economy; the GOP alternative will lower emissions better. Yet a recent report from the Institute for Policy Integrity shows that the rapidly falling cost of renewable energy technologies, coupled with the stubbornly low price of natural gas, mean that CPP compliance is likely to be cheaper than anyone projected.

The Trump administration had no interest in conducting a good-faith update of the E.P.A.’s original estimates. Instead, it relied on accounting gimmicks to greatly inflate the Clean Power Plan’s projected costs and slash its expected benefits. The rule’s transformation from boon to boondoggle, as laid out in a draft of Mr. Pruitt’s plan to repeal it, is thus pure illusion.

“Pruitt’s willingness to play fast and loose has helped his anti-regulatory reputation soar,” Davis Noll and Revesz write in Slate. “But the brazen deficiencies in the agency’s work exposing the hollowness of Pruitt’s ‘rule of law’ rhetoric should give Pruitt’s supporters pause. Once the judicial challenges run their course, Pruitt may be striking out a lot more.”

“The methane rule was justified based on enormous benefits to the public,” Bethany A. Davis Noll, Senior Attorney at the Center for Policy Integrity, told VICE News, “It will be difficult to roll it back.”

Pruitt claims that his regulatory rollbacks represent a return to the “rule of law,” but he has pursued them in a lawless fashion, cutting corners and ignoring fundamental legal requirements. Now, failing to follow the rules of the game is catching up with him.

A significant concern of administrative law is the status of independent agencies—agencies that are insulated in some ways from direct presidential control. These institutional relationships are particularly important when the President and agency officials disagree over law and policy. In our recent article, The Genesis of Independent Agencies, we ask a core question of administrative law: When are agencies established with features that insulate them from direct presidential control?