In the News

Federal regulations touch virtually all aspects of American lives, so the Biden administration wants to hear from you on how it can boost public participation in the rulemaking process. Upon taking office, almost two years ago, President Biden issued a memo on modernizing regulatory review, which has not been finalized yet. The president nominated Richard Revesz, most recently the AnBryce Professor of Law and Dean Emeritus at the New York University School of Law, to lead OIRA.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act allocated billions of dollars toward “clean” hydrogen. Now federal agencies need to specify what counts as clean. Matt Lifson explains why a marginal-emissions approach is essential.

The Yale Journal on Regulation's blog compiled a reading list on the "major questions" doctrine. The list features Mangling the Major Questions Doctrine by Natasha Brunstein & Richard L. Revesz, which attributes the expansion of the doctrine over the last six years to its aggressive use by the Trump Administration.

Peggy Shepard, the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council co-chair, gave the administration a grade of D in September for its environmental justice work so far, telling a New York University Institute for Policy Integrity event that, in order to do something as transformative as the administration is seeking, “you have to restructure . . . but that has not happened and that is really the crux of the problem, that structurally, nothing has changed in any of these agencies.”

The FTC voted 3-1 along party lines to issue the Junk Fees ANPR. The Junk Fees ANPR was issued following the issuance of a Petition for Rulemaking filed by the Institute for Policy Integrity in December 2021.

The issue represents one of multiple instances in which critics of strict climate- and energy-related rules are attempting to leverage this summer’s Supreme Court ruling in West Virginia v. EPA that curbed the agency’s greenhouse gas regulatory authority under the major questions doctrine, which says that policies with significant political or economic effects require “clear” statutory authority. But Oct. 20 supplemental comments from the Institute for Policy Integrity (IPI) at New York University argue that West Virginia should not apply to FERC’s long-pending gas review policies, which would require consideration of upstream and downstream greenhouse gas emissions when assessing projects under the Natural Gas Act (NGA) and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

The new study could add to calls to limit public health risks from gas stoves. Earlier this year, the Institute for Policy Integrity (IPI) at New York University pressed the Consumer Product Safety Commission to address such risks -- an effort that comes as California and various local governments seek to limit gas-fired appliances over climate change concerns.

If confirmed, Revesz would be uniquely positioned to help shield the president’s climate regulations from legal scrutiny, a challenge that has derailed the administration’s decisions repeatedly. While at New York University, Revesz tracked and evaluated the Trump administration’s poor record defending its environmental decisions in court.

Max Sarinsky, senior attorney at the Institute for Policy Integrity of New York University School of Law, lauded the FTC’s decision to implement regulation surrounding so-called “drip pricing” tactics in event ticketing, which that organization had pushed for in a 2021 New York Times Op-Ed and petition that paved the way for Thursday’s vote. “Drip pricing has no legitimate business purpose and harms consumers,” he said in a statement issued following the FTC’s decision. “Regulating this pervasive practice will save consumers both time and money, and make it easier to compare the actual prices of competing offers. Today’s notice represents an important step in the effort to protect consumers from drip pricing, and the Commission should move ahead with regulating this deceptive practice.”

EPA’s Science Advisory Board (SAB) is urging the agency to begin to systematically quantify the environmental justice (EJ) benefits of its air pollution rules, a potentially sweeping recommendation that could help the agency justify stricter controls on mobile and stationary sources. The recommendation is spelled out in a Sept. 27 draft SAB report on EPA’s proposed phase 3 heavy-duty truck and engine rule recently posted to the board’s website ahead of a Nov. 3 meeting where the advisors are slated to discuss it. Meredith Hankins, an attorney with the Institute for Policy Integrity (IPI) at New York University law school, said it was noteworthy that the proposed rule included the first-time distributional impact analysis evaluating baseline conditions as well as the results if the proposed rule’s more stringent option were implemented.