In the News

Heat exposure harms workers who labor outside, such as agricultural and construction workers, and those in high-heat indoor environments, such as warehouse employees, restaurant workers, and many others. Learning from workers and organizers with on-the-ground experience will enable OSHA to craft a more effective heat standard.

Now that the Biden administration has had a chance to take a crack at it, the legal justification looks much sturdier, according to Richard Revesz, a professor at New York University School of Law and director of the Institute for Policy Integrity. "What EPA does is establish that the direct benefits are sufficient to justify the rule," Revesz said. "The direct benefits are large and very significant."

"By considering both direct and indirect benefits in this decision, EPA revives analytic best practices cast aside by the Trump administration," Richard Revesz, director of the New York University School of Law's Institute for Policy Integrity, said in a statement. "The newly restored approach is endorsed by the Office of Management and Budget's longstanding guidance and by all respectable economists and, prior to the Trump administration, had been the norm in both Republican and Democratic administrations for decades."

As the Federal Transit Administration and its partners roll out electric transit across the country, the agency should ensure that its Title VI guidelines for funding recipients explicitly require nondiscrimination in the distribution and routing of such clean vehicles. FTA should also implement the appropriate reporting requirements to effectively monitor the distribution of electric vehicles and their air quality benefits. These recommendations are discussed in more detail in our comments to the agency.

New York University’s regulatory policy center is urging EPA to adopt “best practices” for TSCA risk management rules that would lead to stringent limits on existing chemicals, potentially offering legal and policy justifications the agency could use to grant environmentalists’ requests to go beyond what they see as too-lenient Trump-era chemical evaluations.

At the Institute for Policy Integrity, a New York University think tank critical of Trump administration environmental policies, Director Richard Revesz said the forecasting requirements "sought to put a thumb on the scale in favor of deregulation and would have caused additional deaths, illnesses, and lost work days and decreased the overall welfare of Americans. The repeal of this rule is an important step to restore scientific integrity at EPA."

New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity in a new report is arguing the Trump administration failed to adequately consider many health and environmental benefits from strict effluent limits for certain power plant discharges but that simple policy changes would allow EPA to give appropriate weight to climate and other harms. The report, written by Bethany A. Davis Noll and. Rachel Rothschild, comes as the Biden administration is reviewing the Trump EPA’s effluent limitation guidelines (ELGs) for coal-fired power plants for possible changes.

The new rule—which required a quick turnaround from the Biden administration—comes after courts struck down updates from 2016 and 2019 for not providing a full remedy that would help northeast states manage summertime smog. "The Obama administration's 2016 update issued this concededly partial remedy that didn’t actually achieve attainment with the 2008 ozone NAAQS,” said Jack Lienke, Institute for Policy Integrity regulatory policy director.

Eight days before President Donald Trump leaves office, the EPA published a rule on 13 January that sets 3% of total gross US greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as the significant threshold at which the agency can regulate releases of these pollutants. Below that level, the EPA said no endangerment of public health would ensue. "The final rule violates the APA because it isn't a logical outgrowth of EPA's 2018 proposal and the public didn't get a meaningful opportunity to comment on the 3% threshold for significance," Jack Lienke, regulatory policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity and an adjunct professor at NYU School of Law, said.

The impending power shift in the Senate means Congress will once again turn to the Congressional Review Act to scrap a bevy of regulations. Hill Republicans and President Trump used the CRA to kill 16 Obama-era rules in 2017. Democrats, in contrast, have never deployed the CRA. "It's the quickest way to get rid of policies that will cause significant harms to the health of Americans and to the quality of our environment," said Ricky Revesz, a New York University professor whose name has been mentioned as a possible Biden regulatory chief.